Raymond Barnett

 

OK, this is going to be a bit strange.  But that's why you scan Barnett's meanderings anyway, eh?  My observation is that there are two distinct advantages to connecting with the basic conditions on our home planet. 

 

Earth is fundamentally, first and foremost, a water place.  Water-filled seas comprise two-thirds of the planet's surface, ceaselessly in motion.  Our distance from the sun conveniently keeps these seas in the liquid condition permitting such movement, though not completely prohibiting the water's condensing into ice or expanding into vapor where conditions permit. 

 

Two advantages to immersing yourself in this moving water.  First, it's long been known that water in motion creates negative air ions, which physiologically interact with the brain to make humans happy, to the point of euphoria in some.  No wonder we all like to sing in the shower!  Want to be happy?  Spend time around moving water (sorry, ponds don't work). 

 

Secondly, if you want to be thoroughly "at home" on your home planet, you're well advised to connect up with its primary, fundamental attribute by spending time immersing yourself in the earth's primary pulse:  water in motion.  There're lots of ways to do this; allow me to recount a few of them that work for me. 

 

Simplest and easiest:  stand under water falling in a natural, fresh-air habitat.  Hawaii offers this in spades (see photo), at least on the "wet" sides.  But you don't have to go to Hawaii.  Here in southern Arizona, you can find waterfalls in deep canyons of the mountains, such as Sabino Canyon National Park northeast of Tucson.  Get off the shuttle taking you to the top of the canyon at stop number eight, climb up Sabino Creek a ways, and you'll find a wonderful waterfall under a cleft in the rocks, that often has a short line of happy people vying to enjoying standing under it.  Ahhhh. 

 

Or you can get horizontal in a rushing stream and let the water flow past you.  A regular stop on my bicycle loop in Chico's Bidwell Park in California features a place where I can park my bike and clamber down to lay horizontally in Big Chico Creek there, in 12 to 18 inches of rapidly flowing water.  I grasp a couple of largish rocks with my outstretched hands, and hold myself within the flow of the water past me—discovering that my body is whipped in an undulating rhythm by the water, and kinetically vibrating just as a cello's string vibrates by the force of the bow across the string.  An interesting sensation, which varies according to the depth and the force of the water. 

 

But best of all:  placing myself in the flow of waves rolling into a stretch of beach in Hawaii or other coast.  I do this in two situations.  First, sitting in a tidepool's gravel bottom in 6 to 18 inches of water with lava ledges, overhangs, pools, and canals all around me, letting the incoming waves gently push and pull me back at forth as they wash in and out.  I'm completely in the embrace of the ocean, with anemones, limpets, corals, sponges, urchins, and sea cucumbers either in sight within inches of me or out of sight for many feet all around me.  These creatures are benefiting from the incoming waves bringing them food particles and oxygen-rich water.  And me?  As I sit there, being pushed and pulled back and forth by the waves, I'm completely within the embrace of the ocean, joining the abundant life of the sea in its dance with the never-ceasing rhythm of the oceans.  Wonderful.

 

I like the above tidepool-sitting best of all, but another aspect of the experience occurs when I've snorkeled for 45 minutes along a stretch of the Maui coastline just east of Keawakapu Beach, and approach another stretch of beach often frequented by sea turtles.  An array of large boulders complicate the entrance to this beach from the water, and a concrete pier juts out to form the immediate far side of the beach's approach through the rocks.  I get onto the beach by snorkeling through the route the water "wants" to go.  No way to micromanage this or bulldoze my way through—there lies injury.  I just slow down, follow the zigzagging route where the water goes, respectfully negotiating the tricky parts with boosts or brakes from my flippers, and soon enough I'm sitting on the sandy beach in a foot of water, pretty tuckered out (Hey! I did this throughout my 70's!) but feeling wonderful, sitting there as the waves wash in and out, the sun warm on my skin, butterflies and dragonflies flying past me, just enjoying being part of the push and pull of the waves.  Immersed in the Tao. 

 

          Try it, as and where you can.  Doubtless you have your own version of getting in contact with the pulse of the planet; let me know, I'd enjoy hearing from you.  And enjoy!     

 

 

Once upon a time, though not so long ago, the story of humans on the planet went like this.  Variously called "the perpetual progress story" or "the march of civilization", it presented human lives as "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" through the Paleolithic, constantly on the move in an unending, bitter pursuit of animal game.  The domestication of plants (especially cereals) and animals in the glorious Neolithic Revolution permitted humans to settle down and farm. Humans were happily propelled by agriculture through a quick, inevitable, brightly lit progression from villages to urban living and the undoubted blessings of "civilization".  Cue relief and applause and hearty back-slapping of all. 

 

This depiction has turned out to be nonsense, very much a fiction written by the victors in a cruel "wrong turn" of human history.  The rewriting of early human history has resulted from the last three decades of archaeological research.  This carefully-conducted research by professional archaeologists and anthropologists has generated a consensus about what actually transpired in this critical phase of the human story.  Leading figures in this new consensus have been Yale's James Scott (Against the Grain, 2017) and Mark Elvin (The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, 2005). 

 

The new discoveries indicate that changes began during the last 5,000 years of the Paleolithic, which saw humans settling down earlier than previously thought.  Paleontologists renamed those years as the Mesolithic.  It is this new combination of the 5,000 years of the Mesolithic (12,500 to 7,500 BCE) with the 5,000 years of the Neolithic (7,500 to 2,500 BCE) that we now know was a period of bursting change, change at utter odds with the former and now discredited "march of progress" story. 

 

A key difference in this new understanding of the human story is the role of agriculture (which Jared Diamond famously called "the worst mistake in the history of the human race").  In the now-discredited "Perpetual Progress" version, plant and animal domestication occurred over a relatively short time and humans quickly adopted full-time agriculture, pictured as gratefully leaving the brutish hunting-gathering subsistence economy well behind altogether.  The benefits of the sedentary life coupled with agriculture's benefits were claimed to propel humans quickly into cities and the start of a bright history. 

 

Not so, reveals the new research.  Firstly, domestication was a long process, and as it occurred humans did not promptly jettison hunting and gathering.  In fact, the archaeological research now shows, humans continued relying primarily on their hunting-gathering economy for—ready for this?—thousands and thousands of years after domestication of plants and animals.  Calorically, hunting and gathering remained their main source of sustenance, and was merely complemented by the newly domesticated plants and animals. 

 

A corollary of this new discovery was that the use of domesticated resources was, for ten millennia, nothing like the full-time occupation that we think of when we mention "agriculture".  In fact, the Meso-Neolithic humans were practicing what we today call "gardening."  They were raising easily-tended polyculture plots and small, easily managed animals.     

 

James Scott and others have long wondered why humans would abandon a subsistence economy of the congenial, leisure-packed, healthy occupation of hunting and gathering and replace it with the year-round, back-breaking drudgery of intensive farming (before machines).  Good question.  Scott: "Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers...have never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure.  Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never looked so bad—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure…There is no reason why a forager in most environments should shift to agriculture unless forced to by population pressure or some form of coercion."  The source of that "coercion": what Elvin terms the Militarized Urban-agrarian State, which we'll examine soon.

 

The question is now answered:  early humans in fact didn't abandon hunting and gathering for full-scale farming.  They kept their hunting and gathering subsistence economy and added small-scale gardening to complement it.  Depending on the vagaries of weather and natural disasters, they could and did easily switch back and forth and apportion the amount of time and energy distributed amongst hunting and gathering and the new gardening.

 

These new discoveries, moreover, add a most unexpected twist to the appearance of full-time monoculture agriculture ("farming").  This phenomenon occurred only as a result of events during the rise of cities in the Bronze Ager after the Neolithic.  These new cities were dominated and ruled by patriarchal elites whose primary occupation was war and the seizure of luxury resources from their neighbors.  These new masters of civilization were clear about who was in charge.  As Han Fei, adviser to the brutal Qin Shi Huangdi who founded the third-century BCE Han empire put it: "They extended congratulations on the birth of a boy; girls they killed." 

 

It is for this reason that Elvin aptly names the early patriarchal cities as the Militarized Urban-agrarian State.  That is, full-time intensive agriculture was invented by the new urban rulers and, by force of their new armies, imposed upon the former hunting-gathering-gardening populations who lived in villages in the countryside surrounding the cities. 

  

Elvin quotes the 4th century BCE Chinese Manual of Master Guan (Guanzi Jiping) about how this critical change was accomplished by the patriarchal rulers of the cities.  "One controls the people as one controls a flood.  One feeds them as one feeds domestic animals. One uses them as one uses plants and trees."  Elvin summarizes: "It must be remembered: fields end freedom…humanity itself became one of our own domesticated species."  This change must surely be regarded as one of the most momentous in human history, and one of the most heart-breaking.

 

Let us turn now to a more detailed look at what these three decades of archaeological research indicate life was like for our ancestors in the Meso-Neolithic.  One key difference concerns the type of society these early humans lived in.  Burials, grave goods, figurines, and their art amply demonstrates that these Meso-Neolithic societies were dramatically different than the patriarchal, urban societies which followed them. 

 

Grave goods and burials, for example, indicate that males in these hunting-gathering-gardening societies filled the roles of hunters, gardeners, artisans, and traders.  Females were the gatherers, gardeners, pottery producers and decorators, and producers of dyes and medicines.  These data contribute to the current archeological consensus that Meso-Neolithic villages in Europe and China were basically egalitarian among individuals and between sexes.  Though some graves had a higher amount and sophistication of goods, the differences were not dramatic, probably mere reflections of individual variation in skills and success at their occupations—not an elite class or aristocracy by any means.

 

But much more importantly, their burials and art show that these early humans had an unexpected conviction that they were fully at home on the earth, that they recognized a deep kinship with other creatures, and that they were completely satisfied to be of the earth.  This suite of convictions is termed an Immanent worldview (as opposed to our modern-day Transcendent worldview). 

 

For example, the archaeologists unearthed many figurines of human-snake and human-bird hybrids, unmistakable blends of human traits and bird traits.  And engravings on seal stones and table tops in the late Neolithic Minoan culture on Crete show human females wearing bird-masks and dancing in some sort of performance.

 

The burials themselves confirm the immersion of these early humans in the natural world.  Virtually all of them are graves filled with the teeth and bones of birds and mammals, seashells, shells of turtles, and depictions of humans interacting with (though not dominating) animals.  One grave in China has an elaborate tableau using crushed seashells to make figures of a dragon and tiger to either side of the human skeleton, with a depiction of the Big Dipper constellation to the north. 

 

Though all this may seem deeply strange to us, it demonstrates that these early humans were fully at home in the natural world, that they accepted—and celebrated!—their kinship with the other creatures of the earth.  There is no hint at all of dreaming of other realms, or wishing an escape from their earthly condition.  This acceptance of the here-and-now of living on the earth and being integrally part of the grand natural cycles of the earth is termed an Immanent worldview.

 

How long did this Immanent view last?  Ten thousand years, through both the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (about 12,500 to 2,500 BCE)!  Such a lengthy tenure of the hunting-gathering-gardening subsistence economy and its Immanent worldview could not have occurred—succeeded—without an intimate, deep understanding and focus on the natural world.  Our ancestors could not have succeeded without extensive knowledge and understanding of the plants, animals, and cycles of the world in which they lived.

 

This intimate understanding of the natural world would lead to an abiding, long-term nurturing of that natural world, a stewardship of the earth that flows naturally to an intuitive sort of affection and caring for the earth.  The earth gives us all we need, in every way; of course we must take care of it!  How could it be otherwise?  This in-your-bones, spontaneous understanding that we are a part of and so must protect and nurture the natural world is an important aspect of the Immanent worldview that we now know our Mesolithic and Neolithic ancestors exhibited. 

 

The ambition, dissatisfaction, and itch for a "better" world that fills our modern times was clearly not present in Meso-Neolithic cultures.  People were content, just where they were, just as they were.  They accepted their lives and were in no frenzy to change them.  The earth was bountiful; they knew how to tap that bounty by hunting, fishing, gathering, and gardening.  They were home, and content to be there. 

 

Progress?  What in the world was "progress"?  The concept was apparently not conceivable.  Betterment?  Why would you want anything beyond that you had, what your ancestors had, what your children would have? 

 

This way of thinking seems incomprehensible to us moderns.  It seems strange, stupid, dull.  Yet for 10,000 years Meso-Neolithic humans lived very much in equilibrium, in stable societies.  The cultural memory, orally-preserved through generations, of this kind of strange (to us) thinking of the Immanent worldview is reflected in the Taoist religion, a relict of the Neolithic which has improbably persisted into our modern times and been put into writing.

 

From Taoism's Daodejing: "He who knows he has enough is rich…Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done.  The universe is sacred.  You cannot improve it.  If you try to change it, you will ruin it."

 

Could the people of the Meso-Neolithic really think so differently than we do?  Let's listen to archaeologists who have studied the past of humanity in the Neolithic.  Great Britain's Lucy Goodison and Christin Morris: "The twentieth century's preoccupation with human and emotional affairs may have overfed the search for anthropomorphic divinity…We may have been missing evidence of a very different experience and different concerns, ones to do with bones and heat, life and the dead, animals and plants, the weather and the passing of time…alignment to the cycles of the natural world."

 

So we finally see, then, from these past three decades of careful archaeological research, that these newly-rediscovered humans of the Meso-Neolithic's 10,000 years—a  forgotten world—were at home in the world, and content to be here.  Their societies were egalitarian both among individuals and between the sexes.  All had their roles, some overlapping, and seemed to be happy with that. Though not a matriarchy, always were females prominent, as illustrated in a Minoan signet ring shown at the beginning of this essay, depicting a female performing a ceremony atop a mountain (always the center of the natural world) pointedly outside the new city, being protected by a pair of lions or leopards.

 

Yet this world—humanity's world—was dramatically upended, and vanished about 4,500 years ago (a bit earlier in the West, later in China) with the relatively sudden appearance of a constellation of factors:  cities, ruled by patriarchal elites; extreme differences in the quality of life between these elites and all others; a new society with the primary function of warfare; and the avaricious accumulation from neighboring societies of luxury goods for the elite.

 

This change in the history of humanity was the greatest and most consequential that has ever occurred.  Before, humanity was living in villages by means of hunting, gathering, and gardening. Their homes provided shelter from the elements. The living was congenial, leisure time was ample, their diets a surprisingly rich and diverse ensemble of animals and plants.  Societies were egalitarian among members and between the sexes.  People realized they were at home on a beneficent earth, and content to be so.  There was no itch to improve their contented lives or change things.  This was humanity in the 10,000 years of the Meso-Neolithic, amply shown by these past three decades of archaeological research. 

 

And then it all changed, at about 2,500 BCE.  Forever, or at least up to today.  Several things appeared, relatively quickly, in an interrelated whole.  Cities ruled by a patriarchal elite (and its attendant misogyny).  Large armies of conscripted peasant sons, trained to murder the conscripted sons of other cities.  An unquenchable desire by the patriarchal elite for luxury goods.  A never-ending series of wars on neighboring cities and on the earth itself to obtain these luxuries and to produce them by pillaging the earth.  And finally, to justify all this, a new worldview:  the Transcendent worldview, in which the earth is merely an inanimate source of goods, and human life on it merely preparatory to an eternal life in a better place, all sanctioned by a god who looks and acts suspiciously similar to the patriarchal urban elite. 

 

Viewed through the lens of our new knowledge, this change is utterly and deeply heartbreaking.  It constitutes a complete and irredeemable loss, a tragic wrong turn in human history that cannot be righted. 

 

How can we view this loss?  First, we can be very proud that humanity had 10,000 years of contentment, fully realizing that we were at home on a blessed earth.  This was indeed the high point of human history, the apex of our species' life on earth.   These three decades of archaeological research has given us the gift of this knowledge. 

 

Secondly, how do we react to this loss?  Not surprisingly, our Meso-Neolithic ancestors fought the change and resisted it.  As soon as the patriarchal urban elite compelled the villagers to give up their hunting-gathering-gardening and adopt full-time monoculture agriculture—to become peasants—revolts against the urban rulers quickly became common, and indeed have persisted throughout these 4,500 years of history in China. 

 

A short-list, tip-of the-iceberg recounting of such revolts by peasants in just the past 2000 years  of the Common Era (CE) would include Red Eyebrow Revolt, the sorceress Mother Lu being labelled a "witch," 0017; Yellow Turbans 184-188; Five Pecks of Rice 190; Heaven and Earth (Triad Society) 1674 and 1840s; White Lotus Society 1796 to 1804; Taiping Rebellion 1850-1864; Nian Revolt 1853-1868; Muslim Revolts in the Southwest 1856-1873, and Northwest 1862-1873; New Teaching 1862; Righteous Fists (Boxers) 1898-1901; Chinese Communist Party 1921-1949.  While all of these had peasant discontent as primary grounds for the revolt, many of them also involved religious groups (Islam in the west of China, Taoism in the eat and south) and secret society links.

 

This list only includes the major, large-scale revolts of the "recent" past.  Without any doubt, unmentioned here are the unrecorded hundreds of thousands of spontaneous local uprisings, uncoordinated revolts promptly snuffed out by the murders of the peasants involved by local tax-collector or magistrate's thugs before they could swell to major insurrection events. 

 

While antagonism between patriarchal rulers in urban areas and the common folk whose lives they control began in China in about 2,000 BCE, the basic dynamic of the situation has become universal among human societies East and West up to the present.  In virtually every society, it is the luxury-loving rich centered in large cities who comprise the leaders (or control the leaders) of our modern societies.  And it is the common folk who provide the labor, skill, or otherwise create all the wealth involved.  The terms "immanent" and "transcendent" may be long absent from descriptions of human societies, but the basic dynamic remains the same. 

 

From this new research we have two legacies.  One is the knowledge that our Meso-Neolithic ancestors were happy and lived harmoniously on an earth they cherished as their home.  This for ten thousand years!  We also now know that this first, Immanent age was replaed by a very different age.  Our current Transendent age has only lasted four thousand or so years--just half as long as the previous age--yet it has been marked by constant violence to fellow humans and the earth, driven by the patriarchic rulers in the cities.  Though the early Immanent worldview has reappeeared among leading individuals in the past century (Claude Monet, Georgia O'Keefe, Charles Darwin, Ye Duzhuang, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Robinson Jeffrers, AJ Dickinson, Wendell Berry), the new/old worldview they hold is bitterly contested by the Transcendent socieity curretly reigning.  Yet they offer the hope of rediscovering a way of living life that could transform the manner of humans residing on the earth.  A hope, at least.  

 

 

Note:  The above essay is a summary of my book Forgotten World (2021).  The book itself has many illustrations and examples of the archaeological discoveries leading to the discovery of the 10,000-year Meso-Neolithic civilization and the Immanent worldview it held, featuring its burials, grave goods, figurines, and art. The details of the transition from this to the new Bronze Age "civilization", which differed in the West and in China, are examined in the book, as well as the bulwarks of that new Transcendent age (about 4,000 years old and ongoing) and the multitudinous ways in which it carries out its destruction of rival humans and the earth.  I also examine the remnants of the previous Immanently-based age that have, improbably though inspiringly, survived into our current age, including a dozen "Avatars of the Immanent" that have appeared in the past century and a half.

The Three Stooges in China:  Pursuing the Sacred Mountain in 1984

A True Record of an Actual Journey--Part One of Three

 

By Raymond Barnett

 www.raymondbarnett.com

 

For Kyle and AJ

Sacred Mountain, Sacred Friendships

 

The Three Stooges: 

 

Ray.  The Professor   

Chinese History and Language at Yale.

Duke PhD in Biology; has taught at CA State Univ., Chico for 8 years

 

AJ.  The Rebel

American Studies at Yale; lives in Kyoto; travels Asia studying Qi Gong body work

 

Kyle.  The Adventurer

Student of Ray at Chico State; avid world traveler; handsome and sunny

 

The setting:  China, spring 1984. 

Eight years after Mao's death and end of Cultural Revolution.        

Kyle and Ray return to China for first year Independent Travelers permitted. 

Their goal: travel "with the people" to Szechuan's Emei Shan: the sacred mountain

 

 

 

Chapter One:  Meeting the People: 27 hours "standing, aisle" train to Beijing

 

          Even in the arranging of it, the train ride boded ill.

 

Ray stared incredulously at the impassive lady within the ticket window.  "No tickets left to Beijing, tomorrow?" he repeated dumbly, in his passable Chinese.

 

She nodded curtly.  The 50 people in line behind him began to jostle and add more than their fair share to the din in the Hangzhou railway station, a vast cavernous structure of ancient stone containing another dozen lengthy lines of impatient Chinese to either side of them.

 

"No hard seat?" Ray asked.

 

Her eyes flickered to the compartments in the ticket box. Another negative shake of the head, this time with a hint of annoyance.

 

He thought quickly, feeling the impatient jostlings behind him.  A glance to his side at Kyle, who looked very incongruous in his battered blue ball cap amidst hundreds of Chinese.  "Nothing at all for tomorrow," Ray commented in English.

 

"How about the day after?" Kyle immediately enquired in his cheerful, can-do style. 

 

Back to the lady.  The Chinese for "day after tomorrow" escaped Ray, so he resorted to the day of the week.  "Thursday?"

 

Another flicker of the eyes.  Another negative shake of the head, but definitely annoyed now.

 

 

"Nothing at all, today or tomorrow?"

She shrugged.  "Sleeping berths," she intoned.

 

Ray's turn to shake his head, quickly and decisively.  Kyle and he were determined to mix with the local folks.  Two years ago they had traveled through China on an official tour, "Foreign Devil Tourists" stamped on their foreheads as they stared at the Chinese people through the windows of a mammoth air-conditioned bus.  This time they were going to be on the other side of that window. 

 

 "And standing, of course," the lady at the window added with a shrug.

 

The word was vaguely familiar.  "Not-sitting?" Ray asked.

 

Finally a positive nod from the head.

Ray turned to Kyle. "Standing is available."

 

Kyle stared at him. "A 27-hour trip?" 

Ray nodded.

 

Kyle broke into a smile.  "No problem.  I mean, how bad could it get?"

The ominous ring to that query completely escaped both of them, although they would come back to it many times. 

Happily, Ray turned to the lady.  "Two tickets, not-sitting," he announced.  "To Beijing, tomorrow."

 

The lady raised an eyebrow, pulled the tickets from a compartment, marked and stamped them, scratched a tally on a sheet, and informed Ray that it would cost him and Kyle what amounted to $12 each to ride 1200 miles across half a continent in a little over a day.  Standing in the hard-seat car.  Like idiots they grinned and handed her the money.  They were really going to be "with the people"!

 

*   *   *   *   *   *

Early the next morning, munching on long, doughnut-like rolls bought from street vendors outside the station, they found the car indicated on their tickets and thrust themselves into the human sea mounting the high steps and flowing into the car.  Pandemonium reigned inside, with much happy shouting and shoving of suitcases and bundles and crates into the car through the windows, some of the latter containing chickens and produce.

 

Kyle and Ray joined the people standing in the aisle, noting that their fellow standers seemed much more poorly dressed, young, and rural than those seated. No matter.  After ten days in China's southern parts visiting tea plantations and classic gardens, they were headed for the ancient capital of the Empire.

 

Before they even thought about storage, all the available space for luggage in the racks above the seats was completed crammed, leaving their backpacks sitting in the aisle along with sacks and duffel bags of their fellow standers.  They were, of course, the only foreign devils in the car, or for that matter on the train, that they could notice.

 

The other passengers studiously avoided looking at them, except for a little girl in the family taking up two facing benches near the door.  She gazed wide-eyed at Kyle for several seconds, then burst loudly into tears and would not disengage from her mother for twenty minutes into the ride.  Ray was not the least bit surprised at this.  Kyle always evoked strong reactions from females, although his rugged good looks and inherent sunny disposition typically brought forth something closer to admiration. 

 

But this was China, in the mid 1980's, and one couldn't be sure.  The week before in a famous garden of Suzhou, for example, Kyle had been mildly flirting with several young ladies when something dropped onto his head from a pavilion above where he stood.  Kyle at first thought it was spittle, but gazing down had discovered a folded note.  Ray's written Chinese was more rudimentary than his spoken.  Examining the note, he informed Kyle that it either said "We Chinese ladies admire you; we would be happy to meet you at 7:30 this evening," or on the other hand might mean "We Chinese resent you flirting with our ladies; you will be dead by 7:30 this evening."  Kyle kept the note, hoping to get a more definitive translation later. 

 

Soon after the train ride began, Ray was adopted by a family across the aisle, whose mother instructed her two young ones to crowd closer together on the bench, thus leaving him six inches or so at the end to perch precariously upon.  It was actually more uncomfortable than standing, but he could not of course reject her generosity, and with many "xie xie"s ("thank you") he followed her fluttering, commanding hand onto the seat, which was very hard indeed.  The occasion of his sitting permitted the others in the facing bench to finally make eye contact, with friendly nods.  Next to the window was a young, scholarly looking fellow with a mason jar placed on the small window ledge in front of him.  Beside him was a young couple, newly married judging from their happy absorption in each other. 

 

Not long into the journey a large family by the door pulled out a picnic basket complete with fried chicken, and happily began munching.  The paper in which the food was wrapped was carefully crumpled and casually dropped onto the floor.  As gristle and small bones were encountered, they were noisily spat out onto the floor, usually towards the aisle where sat Kyle and Ray's backpacks.  They exchanged a bemused glance; how curious.  Quaint, even. Then the newlyweds across the aisle pulled a nectarine out of a bag and carefully peeled it, the peels dropping onto the floor at Ray's feet.

 

With an occasional nervous look at their backpacks on the rapidly-filling floor—the hulls of pistachio nuts from several passengers were falling like rain—Ray gazed through the train window at the magnificent scenery through which the train was passing.  Hangzhou is in the middle of China, close to the coast, and in this early spring the terraced hills glowed with bright ribbons of color. 

 

The upper reaches of the hills were decked with the dark green of newly emerged tea leaves, the short bushes stretching along in neat rows widely enough spaced to permit the ladies gathering the prized "first pick" to move along filling their baskets.  The lower parts of the hills were usually gaily clothed in the bright yellow flowers of the rapeseed plant, whose dark seeds would be crushed to yield cooking oil.  And in the lowlands between the hills the nearly phosphorescent light green of rice beds alternated with dark, shimmering newly ploughed and flooded paddies awaiting the transplant of the young seedlings.

 

They were several hours into the ride now, viewing peasants in the fields outside patiently directing their water buffaloes in breaking up and ploughing the fields. Inside their coach, most of the travelers had finished their initial snacks and were luxuriating in an after-meal smoke.  Now Kyle is normally a healthy fellow.  Robustly healthy, actually.  But Kyle has an Achilles heel. Or lung, to be precise.  He is acutely allergic to cigarette smoke.  So Kyle began to droop as the car filled with smoke, from every male and many females.  All the windows were open, of course, on this warm spring day.  They didn't know about the other cars, but the hard-seat car certainly had no air conditioning, for which Kyle was thankful.  Even so, he turned quiet and his sunny aura began to dissipate as the smoke burgeoned. 

The conductress soon entered the car and bustled up the aisle taking tickets.  When she saw Kyle still standing she scowled and glanced around accusingly at the passengers.  An old fellow several benches back smiled and waved Kyle over as he pleasantly enlisted the support of the conductress to cajole his two bench-mates to crowd together to make room.  The fellow sported a beard, vest, and hat perched atop his white head at a rakish angle.  Kyle graciously declined the favor, but allowed himself to be persuaded and soon was perched on the end of this bench. 

 

Behind the conductress came a young lady, also in train company blue, with a huge kettle of steaming water in a quilted insulating cover.  The young scholar in the window seat opposite Ray's bench whipped out a small tin cannister, sprinkled some shriveled tea leaves from it into his mason jar, and brusquely indicated it to the tea lady.  With a practiced hand she directed a long arc of scalding hot water over the legs of all of the people on the facing benches into the mason jar, spilling not a drop on the small ledge nor, more importantly, on Ray's legs.  Perhaps half the folks in the car also had jars or cups, often quite crude, which they filled with the steaming water and added a store of leaves to it.  The scholar sighed, happily cupping his hands about the jar, and took a gingerly sip, straining the still swirling leaves with his lip at the edge of the jar.  This tea-water lady passed through the car every several hours for the remainder of the day. 

 

Which all leads quite naturally to a trip to the restroom at the end of the car some time later.  Kyle and Ray noticed with interest that a standing passenger promptly occupied the seat of someone who left to visit the restroom, or even just to stretch their legs.  The interloper grudgingly relinquished their new seat when the passenger returned, though not without a brusque command from the returning ticket holder.  As ticketed folks reached their destinations throughout the day and disembarked, though, and their now vacant seats were claimed by standing passengers, another etiquette pertained.  When a former stander made a trip to the restroom, his seat was of course promptly claimed by another stander, and his brusque command upon his return was stolidly ignored.  This seat was now the possession of whomever currently occupied it.

 

Did foreign devils have any special privileges in this scheme of things?  Kyle soon tested the proposition.  When one of the three men in his bench disembarked, Kyle of course merely took the fellow's space quite naturally and quickly, so he was no longer perched on the edge of a bench but was comfortably sitting, a condition noted irritably by Ray, still clinging with acute discomfort to his six inches on the edge of a seat.  Some four hours later, Kyle answered the call of nature.  To Ray's chagrin, he noted that Kyle's seat was indeed promptly claimed by a young man who had been sitting disconsolately upon a duffel bag in the littered aisle.  And upon Kyle's return the young fellow made no move to relinquish the seat, studiously avoiding Kyle's outraged stare.  Not even the intervention of Kyle's old bearded benefactor could dislodge him.  After all, the seat was fair game for all, now.  So Kyle was once again standing.

Ray was able to make several trips to the restroom so long as his benefactor family was occupying his bench—they simply expanded to fill the entire bench when he left, and contracted to afford him his precious six inches when he returned.  In the midafternoon they disembarked, however, with many friendly nods to Ray and many thanks and "Dzai jian"s ("Goodbye") from him.  Kyle was not sufficiently nimble or pushy to elbow his way in the confusion into the now vacant seats, although Ray managed to expand his edge into a real seat on the end of the bench.

 

Thus they spent the day, all the while marveling at the pile of debris growing on the floor.  To the hulls, gristle, bones, wrappers, and spittle already there a new element was added mid-day when the farm boy who had claimed Kyle's seat leaned over into the aisle, placed a finger on one side of his nostrils, and noisily cleared the other nostril onto the floor.  The procedure was repeated for the opposite nostril as Kyle and Ray gaped incredulously.  No one else on the car took the slightest notice, however.  Evidently floors were fair game for any sort of refuse, short of that deposited in the restroom. 

 

This train was by no means an express.  It stopped at towns and villages every several hours, in addition to mysterious stops in the middle of the countryside.  At the latter, all the windows on the train would be opened to their maximum extent and a veritable rain of trash would pour out the windows—the larger chicken bones wrapped by the family next to the door, food containers, disposable chopsticks, plus any trash too large or bulky to be dropped onto the floor.

"Don't let me be caught standing next to a train coming to a stop, ever," Kyle whispered to Ray.

 

As evening approached, some 12 hours into their journey, Kyle and Ray were both standing again and had been for some hours.  They were stiff, tired, and uncomfortable.  Also famished.  They had not been quick-witted enough—and Ray's Chinese was too limited to realize what was happening—when the lady had come through in the late morning selling tickets for box lunches.  When the old man followed her some half hour later distributing disposable chopsticks and small boxes crammed with rice and vegetables and scraps of meat, they could only look on longingly--desperately, even—as their compatriots claimed the lunches and happily munched away. 

So as evening arrived Kyle and Ray prayed fervently for the appearance of the lady selling another round of meals.  Their hearts leapt with joy as she entered the car and made her way towards them.  For the grand sum of 50 fen—about 20 cents—they purchased the coveted tickets.  And as the boxes arrived they were in heaven as they dipped into the rice and vegetables and few meat chunks.  Though simple, the fare was delicious and quite filling.  Needless to say, the lady never made another trip through their car without their buying a pair of her tickets.  When the meals were consumed, of course, their boxes and chopsticks were casually chucked out the windows with all the others. 

 

As the young scholar by the window made to stretch his legs and enjoy a smoke, he motioned to Ray and made sure Ray obtained his seat.  Ray of course was in heaven again as he eased his stiff and aching body and full belly into the seat.  Stars burst in his head as he eased it down onto the narrow window ledge and actually closed his eyes.  The wind whipped fresh, clean air through the window past his nose, and he made a mental note to let Kyle have the window seat if ever again he obtained it—next time, that is.  After several minutes rest he looked up.  His scholar friend was still smoking.  Ray decorously sat up, sighed, and stared contented out the window.  Life was indeed good.  He was sitting, his stomach was full, fresh air was available, and outside the window the countryside of China sped by, hillsides where the dark green of tea glowed above the bright yellow of rapeseed flowers, here and there interrupted by the small domed ancestral burial crypts scattered on most of the hills they had passed that day, the arch of bricks or rocks marking a burial site fronted by a small stick of bamboo with a narrow white cloth fluttering in the gentle breeze. Ancestor remembrance, flourishing still.  Amazing.  Peasants preparing the fields and planting their rice just as they had two thousand—no, just as they had four thousand years ago, surrounded on the flanking hills by the tended graves of their ancestors.  China.

 

Ray's benefactor finished his cigarette, and Ray graciously and with many thanks returned his seat to him.  Within half an hour they arrived at the station of a sizable town, and quite a few of the folks in their car rose from their seats and began to pull luggage from the overhead racks.  Several of them motioned Kyle and Ray to take their seats, and they gratefully complied with alacrity.  Actually, the steady attrition of passengers had opened seats for most of those originally standing in Hangzhou, so competition was not severe, and a lucky stander could always hope that the seat just scrounged would remain open for at least an hour or so.

 

Kyle had actually obtained a window seat, finally, and he desperately clawed at the window to open it fully and stuck his nose out to gulp in the fresh air.  As he thrust his nose out the window he very nearly thrust it into a fudgecycle being offered by a vendor along the platform of the station.  Immediately upon every stop at a village or city the platforms would be clogged with vendors as they were now.  Loudly they hawked everything from ice cream to fruits to rolls to dumplings.  Kyle succumbed to the allure of the fudgecycle at his nose, purchased two, and handed one to Ray.  As experienced travelers on several continents, they shied away from the street dumplings and vegetables, but reckoned that frozen ice cream was a relatively good gamble. 

 

Kyle and Ray looked forward to these periodic arrivals at stations, not just for the opportunity to claim a coveted seat, but for the sheer happy pandemonium that always ensued.  People joyously greeting each other, luggage being shoved through windows in both directions, vendors loudly hawking their wares, children on the platform screaming at the sight of long-nosed foreign devils thrusting their bizarre faces out the train windows—it was all a thoroughly enjoyable interlude to the numbing grind of standing for the great bulk of twenty seven straight hours in an aisle filled with an ever growing piles of hulls, bones, gristle, snot, spittle, and who knows what else. 

But now they had seats!  Hard, to be sure, but seats, including a window seat for Kyle.  And to compound their joy they were not claimed by those boarding at this stop.  They could retain them until the next large town, most likely, and—delicious hope—perhaps all the way for the next 15 hours remaining to Beijing.

 

Dusk gathered as they sped into the countryside, and virtually everyone in the car (except them) proceeded to take turns at the water basin at the end of the car.  Each carefully unfolded a cotton cloth, wet it, then vigorously cleaned their face and neck and hands.  Some used soap, some not.  But all scrubbed away assiduously.  Then the tooth brush came out, and a thorough cleansing of the teeth ensued.  With a final noisy spat of rinse water into the basin, each person would take several deep breaths and, on the way back to their seat, carefully fold the wash cloth in half.  Upon reaching the seat, they neatly hung the wet wash cloth over a wooden dowel which ran the length of the car just above the windows on each side.  Soon the whole car was festooned with these wash clothes, each one neatly folded as it dried. 

 

Kyle and Ray marveled.  That a people who could endure the floor beneath them at present could be so assiduous about their personal hygiene.  They had noticed long wash basins at every railway station, always busily occupied, at all hours, by Chinese washing their faces, their hands, perhaps their chopsticks.  Clearly they were not traveling with the elite, yet just as clearly these folks were, personally at least, very cleanly.  Ray wondered what these Chinese thought of Kyle and him, who travelled with no washcloth handy, and who must have exuded a different smell than they were used to.  Yet their fellow passengers had shared seats with them and shown them many favors, in spite of their strange appearances and smell. 

 

Of course, there was the condition of the floor, to balance against these folks' personal cleanliness.  Ray tried not to think of their packs still sitting in the aisle as he settled back.  The lady with the tea kettle came by one last time.  The car grew quiet as night gathered, no radios blaring anywhere, the folks with the noisy chickens having long disembarked, only the quiet talk of the friends and families aboard filling the car, above the rustling of the wind through the windows.  Ray looked at Kyle's bench, and saw that he seemed to be dozing, his nose still pressed close to the open window.  Kyle's eyes opened, and he raised his eyebrows at Ray.  "Comfortable?" Ray enquired, knowing fully well how hard his bench was. 

He stared back at Ray, then spoke.  "I've got a window.  I ain't moving until we get to Beijing."  This with quiet conviction.

"And when you have to piss?" Ray asked.

"I'm not risking the loss of my window seat for anything," Kyle reiterated.  "I will not piss again until we reach Beijing."  Ray laughed.  But as a matter of fact, it turned out to be true.  Kyle urinated a grand total of twice in the 27 hours they were on the train, both instances prior to this point where he had commandeered a window seat.  

 

Stiff and sore, they dozed fitfully through the night as the train hurtled through the dark, north to Beijing.  A hand gripped Ray's shoulder somewhat past midnight.  The young scholar, up for a smoke and to stretch his legs, directed Ray to his window seat where Ray could rest his head on the ledge and be more comfortable.  Ray politely declined, but the fellow knew very well how uncomfortable Ray was, and insisted.  Gratefully Ray yielded, determined not to enjoy his hospitality long.  Ray put his head down on the ledge, sighed deeply, and fell into an instant deep sleep.  With a jerk he straightened up an hour later.  The scholar was seated in Ray's former seat, thoughtfully smoking still.  Ray returned his seat to him sheepishly, and with many apologies, which the fellow waved aside graciously. 

The lights came on at four o'clock in the morning, and everyone stirred and began their procession to the wash basin, including the two foreign devils now, though barbarically Kyle and Ray had no wash clothes. But they rubbed their hands under the faucet, splashed water on their faces, and shook it more or less dry, making a conscious effort to be as noisy as their Chinese colleagues.  The whole car nodded approvingly as they made their freshened way back to their seats. 

 

And everyone said those foreign devils couldn't ever learn civilized ways!

 

More delicious 20 cent box meals for breakfast, which Kyle and Ray tossed out the window with their fellow passengers.  As they approached Beijing everyone began to bustle about.  The tea kettle lady entered the car with a very stiff broom and proceeded to sweep all the incredible profusion of bones, fruit peels, nut shells, spittle and snot before her.  Kyle and Ray quickly and gingerly picked their backpacks off the floor and deposited them in the few spaces now available in the overhead rack, holding the backpacks away from them as far as they could. 

 

The broom-wielder did a thorough job, reaching under every seat and energetically gathering the 27 hours' worth of debris into three hefty piles along the length of the floor of the car.  She then brushed the whole mess into a plastic bag.  Kyle and Ray thoroughly expected her to nonchalantly toss it out the window, but she surprised them by lugging the bag to some compartment at the end of the car.  Then an ancient man tottered into the car dragging, amazingly enough, a mop and a bucket full of water with some disinfectant in it.  He proceeded to mop the entire floor with scrupulous vigor, so that as they rolled into the station in Beijing the floor of the car, believe it or not, was immaculate, just as spotlessly clean as it had been 27 hours earlier in Hangzhou.

Shaking their heads in wonder, Kyle and Ray joined the others in retrieving their luggage from the overhead racks.  They joined the throng happily flowing from the train and into the station proper.  Kyle immediately spotted a restroom, into which he disappeared in some haste.  Ray stood nearby with their backpacks in the incredibly vast station, teeming with travelers, the noise level two notches above a roar.

 

 They had finally arrived at Beijing, the ancient and current capital of the Chinese empire.  After Beijing they would head far inland and south, to the heart of China:  Sichuan, and Emei Shan, the sacred mountain. 

 

Perhaps even by train.

 

 

 

Chapter Two:  The Third Stooge, Ray's Near Arrest, and Bicycling in Beiijing

 

          Ray's long hot shower to remove the effects of the train ride from Hangzhou had transformed the hotel's bathroom into a steam room.  As he shaved he rubbed the mirror to remove the fog every stroke or two of the razor, clearly fighting a losing battle with the steam.  The dim reflection of a bulky figure behind him passed across the mirror, not unexpected since the bathroom was shared by several dozens of rooms along the hallway of this Beijing hotel where travelers not attached to a tour were required to stay.

"You speak English?" he blurted out over his shoulder.

A bemused pause.  "No better than I ever have," came the reply in a soft southern drawl, which seemed vaguely familiar.

 

"The hotel takes 3 days to do laundry," Ray barged on.  "You know of any laundry in the neighborhood of the hotel?"

Another pause.  "You're worried about finding a laundry in a city with nine million Chinese?" the voice drawled again, this time with warm humor, and this time definitely familiar. 

Ray turned around, face half covered with shaving cream, torso wrapped in towel, and peered at this figure in the steam.  Large, maybe six foot two or three, and two hundred pounds or so.  A handsome face surrounded by a mass of curly auburn hair and a short beard below, hazel eyes twinkling.  Suddenly the eyes narrowed, and he learned toward Ray with a quizzical look. 

"You…You're…" he began to sputter.

 

Ray shrank back from the towering bulk, then narrowed his own eyes and peered up through the steam at him more closely.  Neurons inactive for decades began to spark erratically.  "AJ Dickinson?" he blurted out incredulously, naming a college friend whom he had last seen or thought of a couple of decades earlier, on graduation day at Yale University in New Haven. 

The tall fellow nodded in shock, still sputtering.  "Ray.  Ray Barnett?" he finally managed to say.

Ray nodded, and they both grinned wide in the steam for several moments. 

 

"What the hell are you doing here?" Ray finally asked.

AJ paused to consider it.  "Taking a piss," the fellow announced grandly.

They both laughed, and it was Ray's turn to sputter.  "But…My God, it's been, what?..."  He did some quick calculations.  "Seventeen years or so since I've seen you.  And never in a Chinese pisser!  Let me finish shaving and I'll drop by your room."

"Fine, Bro," AJ replied.  "Room 312."

 

They grinned, looked at each other again, and burst out laughing as he disappeared through the door.  As Ray finished his shave he tried to remember what he knew of AJ.  From the upper crust of Richmond, Virginia.  In a secret society with Ray at Yale, called St. Anthony Hall, where he remembered mainly the legends of AJ's drinking and successful way with the ladies.  He had taken a course in Southern history with a roommate of Ray's, turning up at their room just as the roommate, weary from four straight days of study, was leaving for the final exam in the course.  "Can I take a quick look at your notes?" AJ had asked, a request which did not surprise my roommate, since he knew AJ's attendance had been spotty.  AJ had leisurely read through the lectures notes in the first hour of the exam, strolled to the appointed room, and in the last hour of the test had earned a slightly higher grade than my conscientious roommate. Such was the AJ that Ray had known at Yale.

 

Twenty minutes later Kyle and Ray walked into 312, down the hall from them.  "Kyle, this is AJ, from Richmond, Virginia.  We went to college together, seventeen years or so ago.  And evidently haven't changed very much, since we both recognized each other. AJ, how in the world did you get from Yale to a steamy shower room in Beijing?"

He raised his shaggy eyebrows and learned back against the bed from his position on the floor, making himself comfortable.  "The day we graduated from Yale, I knew I couldn't take the path most of our friends were taking—law school, selling stocks and bonds.  Just didn't feel right.  So I joined a circus" he declared with a mischievous grin.

"That's right!" Ray blurted out.  "Now I remember your coming through Tulsa the summer after graduation!"

"And very much appreciating the hospitality you and your folks showed me," he commented, a Southerner to his bones.  "But my days as a circus roustabout were numbered, by the draft board."

 

Ray nodded sympathetically, remembering how Vietnam had wrenched all their lives in those days.  "Did you go into the military?" he asked.

AJ shook his head emphatically.  "No way this boy was going to kill peasants in Southeast Asia.  I got a job teaching disadvantaged kids in North Carolina—a job that gave me a draft deferment."

"And after that?"

He shrugged.  "Lots of wandering around.  Finally got interested in Qi Gong, the Asian way to heal the things that go wrong with the body.  I studied with most of the best masters in America, and developed a good practice in California."

Ray thought of AJ's social background in Richmond, and the incongruity of that with "body work" in California.  "What do your parents think of your profession?" he asked with a wry smile. 

A mirroring wry smile from AJ.  "Whenever I go home," he said softly, "I open the door to my old room and discover a shrine."  His face took on a look of wonderment.  "My parents keep my room as a shrine to the son they thought they had.  Tennis and basketball trophies, the official tie of my prep school in Richmond, diploma from Yale, certificates of achievement.  Of respectability.  A shrine to a dead son." 

 

A long moment of silence.  Kyle, stretched out on the floor, bent arm holding his head, finally breathed out.  "Well, you look plenty alive to me, AJ.  Alive and kicking, in fact."

AJ nodded pleasantly.  "And what brings you and Kyle here, Ray?"

"Oh, I'm doing research for a novel I'm writing, set mainly here in Beijing," Ray began.  "Always wondered if I could write a novel.  And also, Kyle and I were here a couple of years ago on a tour, and felt like we missed something in all the tight schedule and tourist spots.  Like we missed the real China.  So we're here to find it." 

AJ's eyes lit up.  "And where do you find the real China?" he enquired with a smile. 

"In hard-seat trains," Kyle groaned, which brought a laugh from all of them. 

"Tea houses.  And parks at dawn," Ray said. 

 

"And sacred mountains," Kyle added.  AJ's eyes raised as he turned his large head to Kyle and his eyes gleamed.

"Sacred mountains?" he drawled, his voice delicious with anticipation. 

"In Sichuan," Kyle informed him. 

"The mountain is called Emei Shan," Ray added, pronouncing it "Uh-may-shawn" as in the Mandarin dialect.  "Sacred for six thousand years, probably much longer.  Li Po was writing poems about it twelve hundred years ago.  Dotted with Taoist and Buddhist temples, thronged with pilgrims.  We're going to climb it."  Ray looked at Kyle with an unspoken question clearly understood between old friends.  Kyle imperceptibly nodded his assent, and Ray turned to AJ.  "Want to join us on the sacred mountain?" 

AJ stared Ray in the eye.  He straightened his massive frame, formally.  "Sacred mountains can be dangerous," he intoned solemnly.  'Unexpected things happen on them."  He glanced over at Kyle, then back at Ray.  "You boys will likely need help.  Count me in, Bro!" 

They all grinned idiotically.  And in that moment Kyle and Ray knew they were from then on The Three Stooges in China, stumbling from one misadventure to another, lovable but having a grand time.

 

AJ had plans with newly-made female acquaintances that afternoon, and Ray wanted to research a place in the Forbidden City for his novel, so Kyle agreed to meet Ray at an island north of there several hours later. 

In his research for his novel, Ray had learned that some 700 years ago Kublai Khan had constructed a 1.5 mile chain of "lakes" running north-south to the west of the Forbidden City, on the west shores of which officials entrusted with running the Mongol Empire lived.  The lakes were demarcated into three "seas":  Zhonghai (Middle sea), Nanhai (South sea) and Beihai (North sea).  The North sea and its surrounding shore now comprised the public Beihai Park, where Ray would meet Kyle later.  But the area to the west of the lower two seas—collectively known as the Zhong-Nan-Hai—continued to be the site where prominent members of China's ruling class lived and worked through the centuries, up to the Communist Party rulers occupying the area now. 

 

Ray was particularly interested in an ancient Water and Cloud Pavilion standing some six meters off the east shore of the Middle Sea.  A stone tablet stood in the center of the pavilion, with a Taoist inscription on it:  T'ai I Ch'iu Feng, translated as "The Autumn Wind Coursing Over the Sea of Life." 

Intrigued by the ancient pavilion and its cryptic inscription, Ray wanted to incorporate it into his novel; to do that, he had to be able to describe it; to do that, he had to see it and get a photo of it.  Which could pose a problem.  Because the photo would require aiming his camera towards the Middle "Sea" leaders' compound directly behind and beyond the pavilion.  Ray reconnoitered the surroundings, noting the armed soldiers standing every 30 yards or so, keenly vigilant against those who wouldn't respect the absolute privacy of the leadership compound.  Hmmm.  Really had to get a photo of that pavilion and its inscription for his novel.  Ray ambled casually around the perimeter, glanced at the guards to his left and right, then when their attention wasn't focused on him, very quickly aimed his camera and got a good photo of the pavilion.  No outcry, no nothing.  Whew!  He ambled a bit further, past another couple of guards to his right, and took another quick photo from what was marginally a different angle. 

 

Mistake. 

 

This time he quickly found himself herded by two of the armed guards to a small open space near the public park of the North "Sea".  Very soon another dozen or so soldiers arrived, weapons aloft, guarding him ominously.  Then their leader arrived, an old grizzled, hard-bitten fellow wearing a pistol at his waist. 

He glared at Ray a long moment, as if he regretted what he had to do.  He curtly told Ray to give him the film from his camera.  Ray understood the Chinese, but pretended not to.  He volunteered to take a photo of everyone.  He of the pistol elaborately pantomimed what he wanted Ray to do: take the film out of the bloody camera and give it to him.

 

Ordinarily, Ray would have been happy to do that.  But this particular roll was a 72-shot roll, and it had numerous photos of locations he would use in his novel, including his precious pavilion.  He could not lose those shots.  So he offered to take everyone's photo again.  The fellow with the pistol became angry, and shouted something at him. He reached out for Ray, as if to take him into custody.  It was the make-or-break moment.  For some reason—this was Ray's first novel the fellow was about to torpedo!—Ray backed away from him, turned, shoved his way through the fifty or so bystanders, and walked shakily across the street toward the public gardens in the North "Sea", where Kyle was waiting.  Ray fully expected a rough hand on his shoulder turning him around to take him into custody.  He walked further.  No hand.  As he got into the public gardens, Ray ventured a look around.  He was already, miraculously, out of sight of the soldiers, the pistoled one, and the crowd.  He stumbled on, found Kyle on a bench.   

 

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Kyle enquired when he saw Ray's face and his shaky walking.  Ray couldn't answer.  With trembling hands he shakily took the film out of the camera. 

"Take this.  Put it in your backpack," Ray croaked to Kyle.  He did so, to Ray's relief.  He was still awaiting the pistoled fellow to catch up with him and take him wherever they took enemies of the state.  He took out a new roll of film and put it in the camera.  If the pistoled one confiscated the camera for evidence, Ray wouldn't lose his precious photos of scenes.  Ray sat back on the bench, and recounted his misadventure to Kyle. 

Kyle laughed.  Annoyed, Ray turned to him.  "See that high Dagoba behind us?" Kyle asked.  Ray nodded at the faux Tibetan tower in the North "Sea" park.  "From there you can see everything.  Including your pavilion in the Middle 'Sea'.  I put my telephoto lens on, mounted the camera on the tripod, and got plenty of pictures of it for you!"

Ray groaned.

 

He never did understand why the fellow with the pistol didn't pursue him.  Perhaps the fellow didn't think the whole ruckus was worth it; after all, it was just a skinny foreign devil that had merely taken a photo of the distant leader's compound.  Perhaps he had other more pressing things to do that day.  Perhaps he was late to meet his young wife for an afternoon liaison.  Kyle and Ray had seen the limousines squiring President Reagan on a visit to Beijing while they were there.  Perhaps the authorities were avoiding run-ins with American tourists while Reagan was there.  However it had happened, Ray had eluded prison in China. 

 

          Early the next morning, Kyle, AJ, and Ray rented bicycles.  The streets of Beijing swarmed with bicycles.  The main east-west drag, Chang'an Boulelvard leading either direction from Tiananmen Square, was perhaps 50 yards wide, of which a least 30 yards were set aside for cyclers.  Since virtually no one owned private vehicles in China, the only trucks and cars on the streets belonged to work units, and the bicycles vastly outnumbered those. 

Soon The Three Stooges were breezing down Beijing's streets, reveling in the freedom and whooping like little boys, which they felt like very much.  To be part of a thousand people within 50 yards of you, flowing along in a tide of humanity on wheels, was something to celebrate. 

 

From every direction came the pleasant ringing of the bells found on every bicycle.  AJ was so taken with his bell that he rang it incessantly.  He was all smiles and at least a head taller than the rest of humanity around him, beaming and nodding and ringing his bell non-stop.  Soon we entered Tiananmen Square and walked our bikes around the Square for an hour or so.  It was early May, and families were picnicking on the cobblestones of the place.  Children rushed about squealing and having a wonderful time.  AJ, Kyle and Ray never saw a single Chinese child that was not clean and cute and well-behaved in their six weeks in China.  Doubtless dirty, snot-nosed children throwing tantrums must exist in China.  They never saw one, though, in town or country or train stations or noodle shops.  Moreover, the studied indifference or barely-submerged hostility of parents toward children, so frequently seen in America, was never observed by them in China, either. 

In the warm, breezy spring day dozens of kites were being flown in the Square, many of them of elaborate shapes, all of them brightly colored and going through fancy maneuvers.  It struck them that the atmosphere in the Square was that of a small town in America, simple pleasures and family-centered. 

 

As they bicycled out of the Square and around to various sights, Kyle soon formulated his Eight Rules of Beijing Bicycling. 

Rule 1:  Buses, trucks, and taxis have right of way at all times and all situations.  The idea of a motor vehicle courteously making any effort whatever to avoid hitting a cyclist was quickly shown to be laughable. 

Rule 2:  Use your bicycle bell to signal your location at least once every five seconds.  Lady cyclists double this frequency.

Rule 3:  Assume that riders around you are poor cyclists and will swerve and veer and stop for no apparent reason at all.  Partly this is because they are often carrying bulky loads:  shopping bags, crates of chickens, small pigs, or wide sofas. 

Rule 4:  Beware the young hot-rodders.  These males (always) had playing cards stuck in their hubs to make clicking noises against the spokes (which all The Three Stooges had done when younger).  These young men were particularly dangerous and unpredictable. 

Rule 5:  Never believe or, indeed, pay attention to a traffic cop's hand signals at intersections.  Large intersections usually have several such cops directing traffic.  Invariably they are giving conflicting signals.  You're on your own at intersections.

Rule 6:  Left-hand turns on bicycles are free-for-alls, always an adventure and frequently dangerous.

Rule 7:  Use the bicycle parking lots and pay the little white-haired lady her two fen (about a penny).  If you attempt to escape her, she pursues you, foreign devil or not.  But it's worth it; if it rains, she will dutifully drape your bike seat in plastic. 

Rule 8:  Lock the absent-minded professor's bike for him, engaging devices built in behind the seat, quickly and easily engaged—if you can remember it.  Kyle kindly looked after Ray in this regard (and many others). 

Once Kyle's 8 Rules became second-nature, bicycling in Beijing was relatively safe, and opened up the city for them.  Every morning they'd go to a new, nearby park at first light.  The songs of cage-birds filled the air, hanging from tree limbs.  All the people were engaged in some sort of physical exercise.  There were a few joggers—invariably young, Yuppie-looking males.  But everyone else was doing some form of traditional exercise, usually in groups ranging from four to a hundred.  There were old folks merely walking slowly and deliberately, swinging their arms in a stylized manner, breathing very deliberately also.  Others were stretching in a series of poses, both of those a form of Qi Gong.  A few young folks did vigorous martials arts, such as Kung Fu boxing patterns or routines with lances or sticks. 

 

But the most prominent exercise by far was the slow, graceful movements of T'ai Chi Ch'uan, what Westerners sometimes call Shadow Boxing.  As many as a hundred folks, mainly middle-aged or old but including some youngsters, would synchronously go through a 10- or 15-minute routine of whirling, feinting, kicking ballet-like movements in slow motion.  It was beautiful.  Occasionally they'd see a smaller group doing T'ai Chi Jian, in which the dancers wielded a sword, sometimes steel, more usually bamboo. 

Whatever their form of exercise, the people in the parks would slowly break off about an hour after dawn.  But rather than rushing off to their homes or jobs, they'd stick around and mingle, socializing in an unhurried manner, with plenty of friendly bantering.  In another ten minutes they'd reclaim their songbirds and drift away in groups or three or four, still joking.  Not once did The Three Stooges notice anyone looking at a watch. 

 

They soon realized in their rambles around the city that it exhibited a distinctly rural aura. Morning and evening they'd find the people squatting on the stoops before their homes, smoking cigarettes and chatting away, the men with pants rolled up above their knees.  Spitting was quite common, with spittoons found everywhere and well-used.  The warmly-dressed toddlers wore pants with slits in them, and their parents carried them over to the curb or to a spittoon when they needed to urinate.  The basis for this rural feel was straightforward: the country itself was still overwhelmingly rural, many of the city's residents only recently arrived from farms and villages.   

 

Invariably The Three Stooges would end the day bicycling to Tiananmen Square, where a festive air always prevailed.  Families sat on blankets or mats, eating a picnic dinner, enjoying the cool evening breeze in the great open Square.  As the hour grew late, The Three Stooges bicycled down the vast expanse of Chang'an Boulevard to their hotel on the eastern edge of the city, enjoying the cool breeze of the evening and the relative lack of bicycles on the great thoroughfare.  AJ towered straight upon his seat leading them, arms folded across his chest, bellowing an improvised ditty about "Bicycling Through Beijing" as they whizzed along, attracting bemused stares all around them for this bizarre auburn-haired giant of a foreign devil with his gold Bison Instruments hat (festooned with a gold buffalo) and his two companions. 

 

I've been struck by how many different ways folks will look back on their lives and pick out what most delighted them.  Let's take a look at what they say on their death beds, or on contemplating that moment.  We'll consider Georgia O'Keeffe, Claude Monet, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Charles Darwin, and the 18th century French writer Voltaire.

 

 Take Georgia O'keeffe.  "When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore," she said halfway through her life.  What a sense of place!  This wildly successful modernist painter, whose work ranged from flowers to cityscapes to surrealistic combinations of mountains with skulls and flowers floating huge above them, would miss spending her days in the distinctive New Mexico countryside.  It was a home she stumbled onto whilst fleeing her philandering, domineering husband Alfred Stieglitz and the tumult of his New York City.  She fell in love with the landscape of New Mexico instantly, and spent the rest of her life there, returning to New York City only for the wildly successful fall shows where Stieglitz demanded (and got) hitherto unmatched prices for her works.  (And where Stieglitz's exhibits of nude photos of Okeeffe shocked her into tears, and made her an instant celebrity.)  Upon his death in 1946, she didn't return to "the city" at all, but spent her remaining years in the landscape that was wholly enchanting to her:  her true home.

 

Roaming the northwestern New Mexico landscape, exploring the dry valleys, mountains, and towering cliffs, brought her happiness for over half a century.  She purchased an early Ford coupe, removed the front seat so she could mount a canvas there, and sat on the back seat painting what she saw as she roamed the countryside (echoing Claude Monet roaming and painting from his boat on the Seine).  Much of what she painted was direct and representational for the most part.  Much of it was surrealistic juxtapositions of what she saw.  Many days she merely walked the landscape, collecting flowers or skulls or hip bones of long-dead animals.  And painted them, in various spatial relationships, or looking up at the sky through the hip bone's obturator foramen, either in "real time" color or bright red and orange--playing, reveling in the world "as I see it."  She was perfectly content with living in and painting her beloved landscape during the day, then retiring with her hot tea and classical music in her Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu homes; then rising early the next morn to watch the sun rise from her rooftop aery.  Happy. 

 

Or the French impressionist Claude Monet.  On his death bed in 1926, he looked back on his long and incredibly successful career and admitted "All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it."  Somewhat earlier, he had observed that "I have no other wish than to mingle more closely with nature, and I aspire to no other destiny than to work and live in harmony with her laws."  This was a person entranced with the interplay of sunlight, wind, and waves at the Norman seashore, and with the Japanese bridge and water lilies of his pond created by the diversion of a tributary of the nearby Seine.  This was all he needed to inspire him to a career of 66 years of paintings of wind, water, skies, ponds, and flowers.  By broad consensus he was the apex of French painting.  Unlike Okeeffe, for whom a particular place entranced her, Monet was rather entranced by the interplay of natural processes, "to let my brush bear witness to it."

 

Water, sky, and flowers dominated Monet's work, whether at the seashore of Normandy or from his boat on the Seine or from his famous garden at Giverny.  When ponds were not available at Giverny he petitioned the local authorities and created his own, planted it with bamboo and water lilies, then doubled its size and added a Japanese bridge.  He had long been inspired by Japanese woodprints, and filled his home and kitchen with them on his walls.  He gardened incessantly.  "I dug, planted, weeded myself; in the evenings the children watered."  The kitchen garden provided food for the table; the flower garden provided subjects for his paintings.  Even as his eyesight failed him, he painted still, his canvases becoming larger and larger, filled to bursting with the beauty of the world.  By the end, he built a huge, high gallery to accommodate paintings six feet tall and 20 feet long, soon after his death to fill the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris and awe centuries of visitors—his witness to the beauty of the universe. 

 

American naturalist and cultural critic Henry David Thoreau led a troubled life alternating between the close study of his beloved New England, especially the Concord River, and his thorough disgust at the lives of "quiet desperation" of the people who lived there.  As a young man, he was deeply unhappy, and urged by his best (and nearly only) friend, the poet Ellery Channing, to move to Walden Pond: "go out upon that (land)…and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."  In his famous Walden, or Life in the Woods, Thoreau alternates between two moods:  exalting the intellectual life of books and spiritual explorations in Eastern civilizations through the centuries, on the one hand, and losing himself in the present daily beauty and rootedness of the natural world, roaming the rivers and forests of New England, on the other.  Early in his short life, and in the Walden Pond book, he seems to favor the exotic, ageless intellectual glories of books. 

 

But later in life, Thoreau mellows, becomes more interested in the rivers and woods; he throws himself into a study of the native Americans and how they live immersed in the natural world, observing their daily lives and accompanying them on hunting and foraging trips. Thoreau had contracted tuberculosis at age 18.  Upon his death bed, at age 44, with Ellery Channing beside him again, he says in a low, gentle voice, "Now comes good sailing."  Finally, Thoreau is at home in the winds and waters of the world.  Then, whispered softly, "Moose," and, finally, "Indian."  Here is his home at last: the forest, and the animals and humans living there, in harmony with the earth, even as Thoreau joins that harmony at death.

 

John Muir kissed the cheek of death more often than perhaps any civilian who ever lived in his adventures throughout the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges on America's west coast and the huge glaciers of Alaska.  Environmentalist Bill McKibben has observed that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild…a language of ecstasy and exuberance."  Truly he is declared the Father of the National Park system and the Father of American Environmentalism.  Near the end, in his home in the Alhambra Valley north of San Francisco, he feels his lungs filling with fluid, and updates the home with new furnishings and conveniences for daughters Wanda and Helen.  He pens his last entry in his Journals, thinking of death: "The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—home-going.  So the snow-flowers (snowflakes) go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil.  Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death's arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit—waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at his own heaven-dealt destiny.  All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried.  Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love.  Yet all are our brothers, and enjoy life as we do, share heaven's blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."  The masterful, assured Muir invites us to explore and rejoice in the natural places of our beautiful world, and to join him there in life and in death.

 

Muir's life was filled to bursting with these explorations and rejoicings.  As a youth, Muir walked a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, collecting plants.  When a bout of malaria prevented him from his planned trip down the Amazon, Muir sailed to California and began several decades of exploration of the Sierra Nevada range, where he discovered relic glaciers.  Intrigued by glaciers, he spent another several decades exploring mature glaciers in Alaska, often alone.  He early learned (to his amazement) that he could make a living by writing about his explorations for Eastern magazines and newspapers, and his joy in the beauty of the natural world.  His writings were full of chapters devoted to water ouzel birds, or to the Douglas squirrels of Sequoia forests, or to the Wild sheep of the mountains, or to the glories of Sugar pines, "the noblest pine yet discovered, surpassing all others not merely in size but also in kingly beauty and majesty."  Through his writings and his life, Muir became the confidante of mountain men, Presidents, railroad magnates, and countless common folk encountered on his journeys.  He indeed teaches and shows all of us that the earth's creatures—including humans—"all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love…die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."

 

Charles Darwin's last words are not particularly uplifting.  He had been shattered by the early death of his favorite child, ten-year-old Annie.  He avoided the funeral of his father and his great mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell—probably because all the graveside promises of life beyond death in the mansions of a loving (yet strict!) God seemed so utterly unbelievable, indeed repugnant, to him.  Darwin had looked forward to the birth of his first grandson in 1876, and was in attendance bedside with his son Francis for the event.  After the birth of the grandson, Bernard, Francis and Darwin watched, helpless, as the wife Amy suffered agonizing convulsions and died shrieking.  So as he lay on his own death bed in 1882, Darwin had no edifying words for us.  Amidst pain, nausea, and spasms, he retched blood for hours, which soon made his white beard red and sticky.  "I am not the least afraid to die" he said, anticipating that his friends and enemies would wonder.  To his wife Emma he said, "My love, my precious love."  As the night wore on, he muttered "If I could but die," again and again.  Then he was gone.  The photographs of the caped, elderly Darwin, with his ineffably-sad face staring somberly into the camera, give us an accurate record of the man.

 

The closest thing to inspirational might be Darwin's closing words of his great work The Origin of Species:  "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."  Yes, our world is marked by beauty and wonder, and we are nestled within it part and parcel, thoroughly at home even amidst its pains and heartbreaks. 

 

Finally, and very briefly, a description of the towering writer and philosopher Voltaire's last words.  Upon his death bed, the officious attending priest urged him to explicitly renounce Satan.  Replied Voltaire, "Surely this is no time to make new enemies." 

 

Indeed. 

 

I've had a couple of near-brushes with prison in my life, the first, almost comical; the second not at all comical.  Let's begin with humor, then go to drama. 

 

I was in my one year of seminary after graduation from Yale.  It was at the Union Theological Seminary, in New York City sandwiched on the Upper East Side between Columbia University a few blocks to the south and Harlem the same distance to the north.  This being spring of 1968, student protests were in the air, mainly against the ongoing war in Vietnam ("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you killed today?").  A large group of student protestors led by Mark Rudd of the Students for a Democratic Society (sic) had taken possession of Columbia President Grayson Kirk's office in the administration building, barricading themselves in and generally trashing the office and daringly smoking cigars throughout the week or so of the protests.  A few of my fellow seminarians had joined the protestors  It was, of course, of keen interest to all of us, being as we were merely a couple of blocks from the excitement. 

 

With amazingly bad timing, I decided to go see what was happening that day, on the morning of April 30.  As I arrived, NYPD officers stormed the campus with tear gas, roughly yanked the protesters out of President Kirk's office, and shepherded some 700 protestors to the rows of "paddy wagons" awaiting us, the acrid smell of tear gas hanging in the air.  Yes, "us."  Young Ray found himself in a large group of very disheveled, wild-haired, smelly protestors being herded toward the paddy wagons. 

 

"Hey, I'm not a protestor!  I'm just a curious bystander.  Hey!"  I finally got a cop to look at me.  Quite in contrast to the others, I was wearing a coat and tie, had recently shaved and showered, even combed my hair.  He squinted at me, shook his head with a growl, and said, "Get outta here, you idiot."  I eagerly agreed that I was an idiot, and removed myself speedily from the group and retreated to the peace and calm of my seminary room to study Old Testament history.  I guess I'm not much of a protester; I was happy to concentrate on my studies from then on.  (Though Columbia and many other campuses these days are still seeing protests, aren't they?  I'm glad I'm retired.)

 

As it turned out, the majority of the 700 protestors at Columbia were from other colleges around the country, semi-professional agitators who fancied themselves to be saving America from a mistaken war in Southeast Asia.  In fact, they succeeded, as LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) did indeed decline to run for his second term of the presidency due to the turmoil engulfing the country.  And by the second month of my 1969-70 tour of duty with the U.S. Army at Headquarters, US Army, Vietnam in Long Binh (but that's another story), I had also concluded, somewhat belatedly, that the protesters in fact were entirely right.  I even suspected that we (the U.S.) might be fighting a losing battle on the wrong side of the conflict; I had reason to think that I was not the only one harboring such a suspicion. But that's all ancient history.

 

However, my finding myself in a group of protesters being herded to a paddy wagon was somewhat comical, despite the agonizing history associated with the Vietnam War.  My second, not-a-bit comical brush with prison, occurred in Beijing, China, in the spring of 1984.  I found myself surrounded by several dozen Chinese soldiers armed with rifles, with a crowd of some 50 bystanders eagerly watching what was about to happen to the skinny young foreign devil who had most unadvisedly spied on the leadership compound in the Second "Sea" of Zhong-Nan Hai Park in the Forbidden City. 

 

What the heck was I doing in Beijing, China in the spring of 1984? I had co-led a tour to China two years earlier, with my buddy (former student, now close friend) Kyle in the group.  Kyle and I chafed under the restrictions of the tour, led by a Chinese lady whose responsibility was taking us to sanctioned locations, and generally keeping us out of trouble.  Kyle and I, characteristically, had come back to China to wander about the country on our own, not perhaps to get into trouble, but to do what we wanted.

 

I had corresponded with the Chinese scientist Ye Duzhuang, who had translated all of Charles Darwin' work into Chinese, wondering whether I might speak with him while I was in Peking.  To my surprise, he invited me to give a lecture on May 7 to the scientists of the Academia Sinica by invitation of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), concerning "Current challenges to the Darwinian view of Evolution."  (The IVPP was the successor to the paleontologists, including the Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin, who discovered the Peking Man skulls in the late 1920's.) I gave my lecture to a crowd of over a hundred scientists, prefacing the talk in my rudimentary Chinese, then in English translated by a young Chinese fellow, Yu Xiaobo (with whom I have remained friends and corresponded for these 40 years). 

 

After the talk, and a fascinating dinner at Ye's home (see chapter 23 in my 2021 Forgotten World for an in-depth history of Ye's tumultuous life and my dinner with him and his colleagues), I got to work on my secondary agenda item for the trip: research scenes and locales for what would be my first novel: Jade and Fire (Random House, 1987).  In my research for the novel, I had stumbled across a reference to a small Chinese pavilion located some 15 yards off the shore of the Middle "Sea" constructed by Kublai Khan.  Within this "Sea" (Zhong-Nan Hai) is located the compound of China's leaders, now as well as then.  Though Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had died in 1976 (prompting the massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square soon after), in 1984 the top governing officials of China still lived in this compound, a sort of combined White House, FBI, CIA, and National Security Council gathering in one heavily protected place.

 

So here was the challenge:  to get the photo of this pavilion (and its extremely evocative inscription, which plays an important role in Jade and Fire), I had to direct my camera towards the Middle "Sea" leaders' compound directly behind and beyond it.  I reconnoitered the surroundings, noting the armed soldiers standing every 30 yards or so, keenly vigilant against those who wouldn't respect the leadership compound.  Hmmm.  Had to get a photo of that pavilion and its inscription.  I ambled casually around the perimeter, glanced at the guards to my left and right, then when their attention wasn't focused on me, very quickly aimed my camera and got a good photo of the pavilion.  No outcry, no nothing.  Whew!  I ambled a bit further, past another couple of guards to my right, and (I did a lot of stupid things like this, especially when young) I took another quick photo from what was marginally a different angle. 

 

Mistake.  This time I quickly found myself herded by two of the armed guards to a small open space on the side of the bridge separating the Middle "Sea" and the public park of the North "Sea".  Very soon another dozen or so soldiers arrived, weapons aloft, guarding me ominously.  Then their leader arrived, an old grizzled, hard-bitten fellow wearing a pistol at his waist. 

 

He glared at me a long moment, as if he regretted what he had to do.  He curtly told me to give him the film from my camera.  I understood the Chinese, but pretended not to.  I volunteered to take a photo of everyone.  He of the pistol elaborately pantomimed what he wanted me to do: take the film out of the bloody camera and give it to him.

 

Ordinarily, I would have been happy to do that.  But this particular roll was a 72-shot roll, and it had all my photos from Hangzhou and its tea gardens and Taoist temples on it, not to mention my precious pavilion.  I was very opposed to losing those shots.  So I offered to take everyone's photo again.  The fellow with the pistol became angry, and shouted something at me. He reached out for me, as if to take me into custody.  It was the make-or-break moment.  For some reason—this was my first novel he was about to torpedo!—I backed away from him, turned, shoved my way through the fifty or so bystanders, and walked shakily across the street toward the public gardens in the North "Sea", where my buddy Kyle was waiting.  I fully expected a rough hand on my shoulder turning me around to take me into custody.  I walked further.  No hand.  As I got into the public gardens, I ventured a look around.  I was already, miraculously, out of sight of the soldiers, the pistoled one, and the crowd.  I stumbled on, found Kyle on a bench.   

 

"What the hell's wrong with you?" he enquired when he saw my face and my shaky walking.  I couldn't answer.  With trembling hands I shakily but carefully rolled up the film to its end in my camera.  (Most of those reading this will not know how an old 1984 camera worked.  You could physically roll up the film and retrieve it from the camera, containing whatever photos you had taken until that time.)  I took the film out of the camera. 

 

"Take this.  Put it in your backpack," I croaked to Kyle.  He did so, to my relief.  I was still awaiting the pistol fellow to catch up with me and take me wherever they took enemies of the state.  I took out a new roll of film and put it in the camera.  If the pistoled one confiscated my camera for evidence, they wouldn't find anything on the (new) film.  I sat back on the bench, and recounted my misadventure to Kyle. 

 

He laughed.  Annoyed, I turned to him.  "See that high Dagoba behind us?" he asked.  I nodded at the faux Tibetan tower in the North "Sea" park.  "From there you can see everything.  Including your pavilion in the Middle "Sea".  I put my telephoto lens on, mounted the camera on the tripod, and got plenty of pictures of it for you!"

 

I groaned.

 

I never did understand why the fellow with the pistol didn't pursue me.  Perhaps he didn't think the whole ruckus was worth it; after all, it was just a skinny foeign devil that had merely taken a photo of the leader's compound.  Perhaps he had other more pressing things to do that day.  Perhaps he was late to meet his young wife for an afternoon liaison.  Whatever.

 

Why, you ask, did I get into these scrapes?  Those of us who were college-age in the late 1960's realized that we were living in unusually turbulent times in America.  I've been very cognizant during my teaching career from 1976 to 2008 that my students lived in such different times, times when you didn't face the unalterable threat of being drafted and sent to a war in Southeast Asia.  Those times were incredibly difficult for those of us faced with such drastic life choices. 

And a similar turbulence had ruled China since—well, since the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, actually.  Wars, warlords, kidnappings, assassinations; the civil war between Nationalists and Communists, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four.  Unavoidable threats convulsing a whole society.

 

You want turbulence?  Several American Sinologists in the last year have come to the conclusion, based on various good reasons, that sometime in the window of 2025 to 2027, current leader Xi Jinping will decide China is strong enough to invade Taiwan and forcibly reclaim it for the Motherland, thus becoming the greatest Chinese leader since Mao.  At that point, America's president, whomever it may be, will be forced to decide whether the defense of Taiwan is worth a full-out war with China.  A nuclear-armed China, at that, perhaps aided by its ally North Korea, with our West Coast well within the range of their nuclear missiles. 

 

There are times when, lamentably, I'm almost glad I'm about to turn 80, and not expected to be so active in our national life.  Yes, we're living in a turbulent world.  Good luck to us all.

 

Postscript.  You can read Jade and Fire to discover the evocative inscription on the pavilion; pages 344-345 in the Random House hardcover edition. 

 

 

 

 

I had a very strange week in the Sonoran Desert here in southern Arizona in late January, about 3 or 4 days on each side of the Chinese Lunar New Year.  For the few months I've been trying to figure out what the devil was going on.  Though I was "neat, clean, shaved and sober," as Philip Marlow is described on the first page of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, my account of what happened sounds like something from an Uncle Remus ride in Disneyland (before the lovable old fellow was "cancelled" there recently).  So I think I'll just describe what happened—true story, no embellishment nor exaggeration—and end with some provisional interpretations. Feel free to think whatever you want about it.

 

It began one morning as I sat in our (east-facing) front courtyard enjoying the early sunshine over Arizona's Catalina mountains: movement between the homes across and up the street, those bordering the Sonoran Desert in which our retirement subdivision sits.  Yes; it was a bobcat, sauntering across the front yards, perhaps 150 feet away.  A gorgeous animal, tawny gold with the bright black and white stripes on the legs (that you never see adequately depicted in the field guides) and the same color spots on the ears.  John Muir often commented how clean wild animals are—always with bright colors and free of dirt or mud.  That sure was this fellow.  Bobcat sightings are not that rare here, due to our proximity to the desert, so I enjoyed it but didn't regard it as anything unusual.

 

Until the next morning, when Tammy and I were doing our stretches facing the picture windows looking into our back yard.  "Tam! Bobcats, to the right!" I announced in an urgent voice.  Yes, two of them, probably mother and yearling, ambling the length of our yard, looking alertly around them as they glided oh so gracefully by.  I watched, mesmerized by the two of them and their beauty, while Tam ran for her phone.  She got a photo of one looking back at us ("Hey! What's all the fuss?  Never seen a bobcat?" it seemed to be thinking) just before they disappeared over the wall into the neighbor's yard. 

 

Wow.  Three bobcats in two days; now that was a bit unusual.  It won't get any better than this, I thought. 

 

Until the next day, as I sat on a favorite bench ("Ray's laughing place") a ten-minute walk from our home, along a finger of the desert that stretches through the neighborhood. Before me stretched an arroyo some 60 yards across, pretty thick with cholla and prickly pear cacti, palo verde trees, and acacia shrubs.  Movement, close to my right.  And yes, another bobcat glides into my field of view not more than 10 feet from me.  I sit stock still.  Directly in front of me, he pauses, catching my scent, I bet.  He turns his head, looks straight at me, then leisurely resumes his fluid movement, and disappears into the desert terrain.  I sit there, bemused, wondering what I'd done to earn the good will of the bobcat gods.   

 

The next day, I walked my wonted loop through the full-on desert just north of our home, a route that takes me well away from any homes, with nothing but desert for as far as you can see to the north.  Someone has thoughtfully provided a crude wooden bench about a mile into the loop, on which I was sitting, drinking hot tea from my thermos.  Since we get an average of 12 inches of rain a year here, this desert has a very high species diversity of plant life, compared to the other three deserts in North America.  I was straddling the thin bench, facing west with 180 degrees of view from the north to the south, though limited by the cacti and thorny shrubs.  Movement to the north amongst the cholla and prickly pear cacti.  A glimpse of two large ears moving along, appearing then disappearing amongst the vegetation—a mule deer? No, our deer here are the white-tails from back east, smaller ears.  But these ears were huge.  A break in the cacti, and I see—what the heck?  Loping along, almost the size of a small deer, but no.  Loping.  A jackrabbit?  But the largest jackrabbit I've ever seen, coming almost straight toward me.  I'm frozen, steaming cup of tea halfway to my mouth.  The creature lopes up within 8 feet of me, and pauses.  Wind must be blowing toward me, because he takes no notice of me as he forages around on the ground for maybe 6 seconds.  Right in front of me; I'm obviously just an inanimate extension of the bench, though sort of funny looking. 

 

I gaze on the creature, thoroughly mystified as to what species he is.  Clearly, he's a very large species of jackrabbit, maybe 24 inches long, with those huge ears, at least 8 inches each.  But he's glowing with color and it isn't the color of the Black-tailed Jackrabbit that I'm very familiar with from California.  No, this critter is bigger than that jackrabbit, and not grizzled brown and black fur but gloriously white fur—again, spotlessly clean--on his flanks and belly, grading to grey speckled with black on his back.  Now, I'm a mammologist, who taught the subject for 32 years, emphasis on California, but this guy was completely new to me.  He positively glowed with health and color, and the naked interior of those 8-inch ears was a lovely soft shade of blood pink.  The most beautiful thing I've ever seen?  Close to it.  And 8 feet from me!  He soon loped away, leaving me very nearly breathless.  I finally resumed lifting my cup the rest of the way to my mouth, gulped the tea down, and poured myself another cup with shaking hand.  I didn't have my guidebook with me, so I had no idea what species of jackrabbit this fellow was (turned out to be Lepus alleni, the antelope (or "Mexican") jackrabbit, who's not supposed to be this far north and west).  But he had sure given me a treat.  I got up to resume my walk, and from the high ground on which the bench sat, I looked across the desert and, believe it or not, I could see him picking his way amongst the cacti as he loped along.  Amazing. 

 

But my strange week in the desert wasn't over, by any means.  A couple of days later I made my weekly car trip to Sabino Canyon, on the other side of the Catalina mountains.  On the walking road into the canyon, you pass a hill to the east, then dip down a long descending stretch of road.  Atop the hill is a rugged stone structure, used for water storage in the past.  Because my good wife and daughter #3 tell me I need to get some "cardio" workout in my walks, my routine is to walk to the low point of the road, then turn around and vigorously walk the 300 feet or so of elevation gain to the trail leading to the hill, then another 400 feet of elevation gain to the top.  No, 700 feet of elevation gain is not a lot, but vigorous walking—and doing the whole thing twice—gets my heart beating faster than usual. 

 

At the top of the hill, beyond the stone structure there, I typically sit on a rock overlook and enjoy the view.  The canyon and Sabino creek stretches far to the northeast, between high sloping walls on either side, stately saguaro cacti strewn over the hillsides.  To my east the creek flows down the canyon and away to my right, where it empties into the basin on which Tucson sits.  A picturesque dam interrupts the flow of the creek just below me. 

 

As I approach "my" rock this day to drink tea and munch a granola bar, I notice something on the rock.  It's a roadrunner, the iconic desert bird, a large specimen, about two feet long counting tail, with dark brown-black coloration, and crested head.  He (probably, from his coloration) appears to be enjoying the view before him.  He doesn't dash away as I approach, as all other roadrunners have.  As roadrunners should.  Rather, he placidly turns and gazes up at me, some 10 feet away.  "Uh. That's my rock?" I stupidly inform him.  More gazing at me.  I take another step.  He calmly gets up, hops over to another rock some 6 feet to the right but with a short palo verde tree providing him some privacy, sets himself down on it, and resumes his contemplation of the view.  Ignoring me. 

 

I make some racket getting onto my rock (it's a pretty good fall beyond the rock, and I've got to be careful as I stow my hiking sticks and get out my thermos and so on).  Doesn't bother my neighbor a bit.  We sit there together, sharing the view, about 6 feet from each other.  This is very strange.  Definitely not roadrunner behavior.  Any more than my mystery jackrabbit was acting like a jackrabbit should.  The bobcats?  They're pretty blasé—top predator and all that—and generally not that spooked by humans.  Though not typically such close humans as me on the bench at Ray's laughing place several days before. 

 

I'm feeling weird, sitting there with my roadrunner neighbor atop the hill in Sabino Canyon, remembering my bobcat and jackrabbit experiences just days ago.  And I remember sinologist Mark Elvin's 2005 Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.  That book contains Hangzhou nature poet Xie Lingyun's "Living in the Hills," in which he lists the large mammals abundant and frequently encountered around Hangzhou Bay in his day, the early 400's AD (aka CE):  gibbons, badgers, tigers, wolves, bobcats, two species of bear, jackals, big-horned sheep, elk, and muntjaks.  Xie Lingyun's list would have been even more extensive, of course, during the Neolithic, four thousand years before, when "civilization" had not yet so seriously impinged on the original wildlife.

 

Elvin observes: "All these species, without exception, seem to have vanished by (our) modern times (from the Hangzhou region)…It would be a folly to overromanticize this fifth-century world. Tigers and wolves are dangerous.  But human beings grew up for several hundreds of thousands of years with animals all around them (culminating in the Neolithic hunting-gathering-gardening period).  A strange silence has fallen (in the ensuing millennia since the end of the Neolithic). An emptiness.  One cannot help wondering what the long-term implications of this are for the balance of our minds."

 

The "strange silence" which has existed since the end of the Neolithic between humans and our fellow creatures, according to the American historian Lynn White in a pivotal 1967 essay, is grounded in the view of Abrahamic religions as expressed in Genesis 9, verses 2 and 3 (I give the original King James translation, not the "revised"):

"So God created man in his own image…And God blessed them, and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea-- into your hand are they all delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you" (italics and boldface in the preceding paragraphs are mine). 

 

It dawns on me.  Somehow, for some or for no good reason, it seems I've been granted a week in the Neolithic, when we humans still had an unusually close association with our wild neighbors, our fellow inhabitants of this good earth.  Before the "fear and dread" of humans came into being.  It's been thrilling. Sitting there on my rock with Sabino Canon stretching before me, I smile.  Then laugh. My roadrunner neighbor doubtless hears the laugh, and stirs a little uneasily, but doesn't move, continuing his amiable contemplation of the view. 

 

I drink my cup of tea, finish my granola bar.  "See ya later," I say, softly, to the roadrunner.  He doesn't acknowledge me.  I gather my hiking sticks and quietly leave, awed by this curious week I've been given in the Neolithic, smack in the middle of the Chinese Lunar New Year.

 

Make what you want of it, but it was quite week.

 

 

The sun was just cresting Haleakala to the east as I hefted my snorkel bag and Big Agnes collapsible camp chair and headed for Kama'ole 2 Beach Park.  With the trade winds revving up early each day here on southeastern Maui, I wanted to be in the water when the first light filtered down onto the reef, before the wind and waves roiled up the water (as had happened yesterday).  It felt great to be walking down South Kihei Drive, with hardly any traffic, the tourists and homeless campers not yet up, and perhaps the most scenic (and snorkeling blessed) stretch of beaches in Hawaii on my left the whole way from our rented condo.  

I dropped my shoes and chair against a dune at the north end of Kama'ole 2, and continued along the high ground of beach access across the point where I'd be snorkeling, a relatively recent lava flow from the aforesaid volcanic mountain several thousand years ago, the frozen rocks creating an incredibly varied and "friendly" reef habitat for creatures swarming the waters there.  A minute later I walked down into the south end of Kama'ole 1 Beach Park, left my snorkel bag amonst the black lava rocks there, and walked into the water with my mask and snorkel atop my head and fins in hand.  When the water deepened, I put my fins on, pulled my mask and snorkel down, and turned to swim out to skirt the shoreline rocks against which the surf was lapping.  

Not 60 seconds into my swim, with more sand than rocky reef below me, there it was:  a Spotted Eagle Ray pulsating slowly beside me, its undulating "wings" propelling it effortlessly through the water.  The holy grail of my underwater career, a creature unsurpassed for beauty of appearance and movement.  While my Scuba-experienced high school buddy Jim has seen plenty, I've avoided Scuba (yes, I'm at heart a Luddite) and seen only one Eagle Ray in my water-surface-snorkeling experience of half a century.  (See my blog for August 2019.)   And this morning:  my second Eagle Ray, flowing past me as gracefully and beautifully as the first time.  I broke my wonted rule and followed her for maybe a minute, until she showed some signs of being annoyed, then broke off with a benediction to her.  

It figured I'd see another Eagle Ray in the sandy-rich area; these rays are not filter feeders, like their more well-known (and larger) cousins Manta Rays.  Instead, the Eagle Rays search through the sand for buried molluscs, and upon finding one simply crush the (substantial!) shells with their fused teeth of each jaw (powered by sturdy jaw muscles, analogous to our masseter muscle).  Spit the shell fragments out and feast on the mollusc flesh! 

While a bit anticlimactic, the rest of the 45-minute snorkel was also good.  This area had been turtle-rich last year, and I wasn't disappointed.  Most of the dozen Green Sea Turtles I swam amongst had just awakened and risen from the sandy bottom when the sun's rays brightened their habitat, and cleaner fish were clustered around them thickly, scouring the shells of the algae encrusting it.  The smaller turtles looked almost like balloons, so thick were the feeding fish around them.  The big guys, though, sailed serenely through the early morning waters in their calm, unhurried way, ignoring the fish clustered about them.  I sensed something big beside me, and twisted about to see a large adult turtle, maybe four feet long, had glided up within a foot of me.  After my adrenaline rush had subsided, I swam along enjoying his company, visions of a St. Francis of the Sea glimmering in my head. Soon he veered down toward a tempting clutch of red algae, and I was just Ray again, rather than a soggy St. Francis. 

Eagle rays thrill me.  Sea turtles reassure me; they radiate an aura of certainty of their place in the scheme of things, going unhurried about their daily business with not a care in the world.  Sea water becoming acidified due to global warming?  It'll pass, give or take a thousand years.  Pollutants washing down from growth of coastal farms and businesses?  It'll pass too, in a millennium or two.  I'm doing my thing, they seem to say; and my kind will be here doing their thing long after you foolish humans are gone.  And you know what?  I think they may very likely be right.  

Lots of fish in the Butterflyfish family pass below me amongst the rock reefs, usually in pairs, all brimming with yellows, oranges, and black: the raccoon, four-spot, teardrop, threadfin and more.  Many sex-changing wrasses too, especially a breathtaking swarm of the red/green/blue ringed Christmas wrasse.  Lots of the blue and black, spotted trunkfish, with their boxy shape.  And large schools of the Yellowfin goatfish, their yellow stripes glinting from the white bodies massed together.  

Then, of course, my favorite, perhaps, the reef triggerfish, sporting whites and golds framed in black, with a touch of red, whose Hawaian name (humu-humu nuku-nuku apua'a) I required my Pacific Basin Natural History students to memorize.  (This was often the only thing the students remembered from the course a decade on, according to many I'd meet long after the course.)  

I was tiring; 77-year-old guys don't have the energy for long snorkels that they used to.  Swimming back to the shore, I noticed a moray eel poking his head out a hole in the rocky reef.  Then, my gear stuffed into the bag, I paused atop the beach access trail at the point between Kam 1 and Kam 2,  enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin as I gazed out at the waves surging over the emergent rocks of the point.  Yes, I think the sea turtles are right.  Everything is doing fine out there, and because the ocean is so huge with so much inertia, the creatures out there will take all the perturbations of climate change in stride and come out fine on the other side in a couple of thousand years.  Even if in our foolishness we stumble into a nuclear war and poison the air and water with radioactivity, that too will get absorbed, maybe even sparking some mutations that help creatures get through the tough period.  

But it will be alright, as it is now.  I take no pleasure in being persuaded to the conclusion--based on research for my last two books, and the scientific articles I've consulted--that our inadequate response to the various phenomena associated with climate change will very likely destroy human civilization, and very possibly extinguish the human species on our planet.  Here I join others similarly persuaded.  Certainly, whether our kind will be here after the thousand years or more of recovery from climate changes' catastrophes is an open question.  My hunch is probably not; we're very dependent upon the hugely intricate mechanical/electrical/computerized system that we've woven around ourselves.  But perhaps, just perhaps, some few of us in sheltered, out-of-the-way places will survive, and remember how to grow our own food and tend the soil, even how to fold the raising of chickens (and their manure!) into the system as my buddy Al does on his farm, to create a balanced, sustaining, self-enclosed practice.  Any survivors will have reverted to the hunting/gathering/gardening mode that modern archaeological research shows characterized our kind's first 10,000 years as settled villagers, before the momentous events of about 2,500 BCE (leading to urbanization, patriarchy, misogyny, extraction and production of luxury goods, and warfare) changed it all and led us directly and inexorably to where we are today.   

Perhaps.  But either way, the oceans and their creatures will remain, tho perhaps a bit changed genetically to cope with the new conditions.  Life will continue to pulse and flow serenely onward amongst the sun rising over Haleakala and the tides pushing in and pulling out.  Eagle Rays will glide effortlessly along the sandy bottoms, and fish will clean sea turtle shells, and all will be well.  I grin in the sunlight overlooking the wave-splashed point, adjust my snorkel bag on my shoulder, and stroll toward Kama'ole 2 and an hour lolling in the morning sun on my Big Agnes chair until my good wife passes by on her morning beach stroll.  All is well.  

 

(For an account of the momentous events clustered around 2,500 BCE, see Raymond Barnett's Forgotten World, available from Amazon.)

 

 

For a fellow who grew up in land-locked Oklahoma—maybe because of it—my happiest times out of doors have always centered on water.  I don't discriminate; the water can be salty or fresh.  Hawaii has provided the former; by the time my son was 11 years of age he'd traveled there 12 times with us.  Tide-pooling and snorkeling the reefs have always been at the top of the agenda, there (see my blogs of Nov. 6, 2014; Aug. 3, 2018; Aug. 24, 2019).  Most of the year, of course, it's fresh water activities for our family, back on the "mainland." One favorite such spot is in Yosemite Park, where the Lyell and Dana creeks come together to form the Tuolumne River in the famous Meadow.  We've had many marvelous times alongside Lyell Creek, particularly, in the campground there. 

 

But for most of the year, for the past 46, it's been our home-town Big Chico Creek that emerges from the Sierra Nevada foothills that my family and I have frequented.  My wife Tammy and I were married by a rented minister on the banks of the creek, whose cooling breezes comforted the volleyball and horseshoe players after the ceremony.  Our two kids ("second family," following my "first family" of two daughters) celebrated most of their birthdays in picnics with their CoHousing friends in shady groves alongside the creek.  Every 4th of July the Barnetts would host a gathering at Raspberry Hole in the creek, watermelons kept cool by the waters.  Even the hard days involved Chico Creek.  When my daughter Holly died at age 23, her mother and sister and I bicycled into the upper region of Chico Creek above the turbulent Iron Canyon, hiked a creekside trail far into the narrow canyon there, and tenderly placed some of her ashes on a sharp slope above Salmon Hole, amidst many tears.  Holly and her sister had spent many summer days swimming and sunbathing in that creek.

 

So when Tammy and I moved from Northern California to Southern Arizona recently (see my blog of Sept. 9, 2022), many things changed, but one did not:  I found a favorite creek at which I'm spending much time, and took our two kids there when they visited.  The interesting thing is that while of course Sabino Creek is located in the Sonoran Desert rather than the oak woodlands of the Sierra Nevada foothills, in many respects my new creek is extremely similar to my old creek.

 

How so, "similar"?  Well, the vegetation bordering the creek—the riparian zone—is composed here largely of Fremont Cottonwoods, Arizona Sycamores, and two species of Willow.  In Chico, the riparian zone along the creek is largely Fremont Cottonwoods, California Sycamores, several species of Willow, with White Alder thrown into the mix.  As you tromp up the creek in Chico, hopping or swimming from rock to rock, you notice territorial patrolling by the Flame Skimmer and Green Darner dragonflies—the same dragonflies that also patrol along Sabino Creek here!  And the petite Bluet Damselflies are much in evidence here, as they also are in Chico Creek.  Ditto for the insects in the creek:  water striders and water beetles, for example, as well as the larval forms of the dragonflies.

 

It's no surprise, upon reflection, that the creeks and their riparian zones are so similar:  whether a creek in Arizona or California, there's a relatively constantly supply of fresh water, and the wind-blown propagules of trees and shrubs spread from creek to creek to creek over long distances.  These same environmental conditions give you the startling similarity of creeks and riparian zones across the entire continent. 

 

But as I float on my back down a calm stretch of Sabino Creek here, gazing up at the slopes of Sabino Canyon, I see a very different sight than I would see floating down Chico Creek.  There in Chico, the canyon floor and walls featured patches of valley oak and blue oak woodlands, interspersed among thick grasslands composed of species brought by the Spaniards five centuries earlier.  Here, the dominating trees are the stately Saguaro cacti, reaching 40 feet tall with anywhere from two to a couple of dozen "arms" stretching upward around the central column.  The late spring demonstrated that these bizarre-looking plants belong to the same "Angiosperm" clade of flowering plants as our California cottonwoods and willows, when their white flowers bloom atop the arms, and develop into the sugar-rich, seed-containing fruits which the Sonoran indigenous peoples gathered at festive late summer gatherings. 

 

While the Saguaros dominate, the Palo Verde trees are also common, looking much more "normal" to our eyes; they are not cacti.  But the tiny leaves of the Palo Verde are sparse and soon drop; the tree can't afford the water lost by evaporation.  How do they accomplish the photosynthesis fueling growth and seed production without leaves?  Easy!  The chlorophyll that powers photosynthesis has been moved to the outer surfaces of the trunk, branches, and stems.  The trees are green all over!  And happily making sugars and proteins and DNA from the abundant Arizona sunshine, leaves be damned

. 

And of course Sabino Canyon's slopes also feature abundant species of the smaller (than Saguaro) cacti.  Like the Saguaros, all cacti have long abandoned leaves and relocated their chlorophyl to their stems, similar to what the non-cactus Palo Verdes have done.  Some cacti have relatively flat, disc-shaped stems: the Prickly Pear species, which are effectively protected by arrays of formidable thorns.  They also are flowering plants, remember, so they have spectacular, colorful flowers on the perimeter of the flat stems, of which Tammy has taken many dozens of photos, and depicted many in her paintings.  These flowers develop into masses of high-calory carbohydrate fruits, which the indigenous peoples would also harvest and eat, in addition to the young disc stems.  (Note:  these original peoples of the Sonoran Desert were adept at methods for removing the thorns before ingestion!) 

 

Cylindrical stems are present in the big Barrel Cacti and the smaller Hedgehog cacti, each with many species and armored also with thorns.  But the most formidable (many would say "vicious") thorn-protected cacti are doubtless the chollas (or "choyas").  These exhibit thinner cylindrical stems, and the species of chollas vary from relatively small (the "Teddy-bear Cholla", which is anything but cuddly) to the 20-foot Staghorn cholla and "Jumping" cholla.  This latter plant produces easily-detachable segments whose plentiful thorns seem to leap onto your arms or legs or any clothing you might think would protect you, and thus make you a disperser of the clonal segments—all upon the slightest hint of contact.

 

So, yes:  the plants on the slopes of the canyons in which Sabino Creek and Chico Creek merrily flow are as startlingly different as the riparian zone plants and insects are startlingly similar.  What about the mammals you may encounter in the riparian and canyon slopes?  Some are found in both habitats:  pocket gophers, packrats (tho in Arizona the white-throated woodrat, instead of the dusky-footed), ground squirrels (tho here the Rock and Harris Antelope ground squirrels, rather than California's Beechey); but the very same bobcat and mt. lion prowl both canyons, as well as Raccoons and Ringtail "cats".  Surprisingly, a variety of the Eastern White-tailed deer is found in these portions of the Sonoran desert, just as the Black-tailed deer is in Chico Canyon.

 

Sabino Canyon also contains two rather spectacular mammals not found in California at all, tho.  A mainly arboreal member of the raccoon family common in Central and South America, the Coati Mundi, ambles throughout the upper reaches of Sabino Canyon, tho it is not commonly seen.  (My son Louis spotted one his first saunter alongside Sabino Creek; but then Lou also spotted the only Cloth of Gold cone shell I've ever seen in a Hawaiian tidepool.)  I finally evened-up with Lou on my first rock-hopping jaunt up Sabino Creek high in the canyon, where after swimming through a deep 40-foot pool in a narrow spot between sheer rock walls, I emerged, sat on a rock to rest (Hey! I'm 77 years old!), and heard a Coati foraging in a cottonwood some 20 feet away, all oblivious to any human presence in such a high spot.  He soon caught my scent some seconds after I saw him, and promptly did the only sensible thing, fleeing clumsily away from the weird, dangerous naked ape.

 

The other mammal in Sabino Canyon you won't find in Chico Canyon is the Javelina, or Collared Peccary.  This scruffy but amiable fellow is a New World member of the Suidae, a cousin to our domestic pig and the wild boars of the Old World.  He's only 30 to 50 pounds and not a yard tall, but he's unmistakable.  Unlike the Coati, he's comfortable around humans, and groups of a dozen or more regularly barge into our neighborhood in search of food to complement the Prickly Pear stems and Palo Verde pods found in the Sonoran proper.  (This commonly happens on mornings when the garbage containers are waiting to be picked up and emptied, a task to which the Javelinas are only too happy to contribute.) 

 

Birds?  Southern Arizona is famous to bird-watchers for its incredible diversity of birdlife.  Sabino Canyon is full of Gila woodpeckers, Cactus wrens, and Roadrunners, all unknown to Chico Canyon.  But you will find the occasional Phainopepla (a striking black bird with a crest and red eyes) in both canyons.  Mourning doves are common in both canyons, tho the White-winged Dove only in Sabino.

 

Ah, the reptiles.  The Sonoran Desert Tortoise is common here, and a very appealing fellow, but not remotely a denizen of the Sierra foothills.  Diamondback rattlesnakes are found both places, but southern Arizona is also famous for its dozen-some additional species of rattlers.  I've encountered the Ridge-nosed Rattler (Arizona's "state reptile") on one of my jaunts up Sabino Creek, tho my encounters with Diamondbacks have only been in the desert surrounding our community.  I am acutely conscious of the fact that perhaps the most elusive and fascinating Arizona reptile, the (so-called) Gila Monster clothed in dramatic orange/red and black bead-like scales, has been seen (so far) by only one Barnett:  my good wife Tammy (whose family nick-name is "Hawk-eye," and rightly so). 

 

Access to Sabino Canyon is dramatically different than that to Chico Canyon.  You can of course bicycle and/or hike into Chico canyon, even its upper reaches, which I often did.  But only a rough dirt/gravel road is available for vehicles, which is often closed in the rainy winters.  Sabino Canyon?  Private vehicles into the canyon are prohibited, but there is a daily open-air, electric-powered tram/shuttle which will take you on-the-hour (for a small fee; better make a reservation online) from the Visitor Center up into the Upper Canyon, the well-maintained asphalt road crossing 10 bridges over Sabino Creek as it hugs the creek all the way up.  There are nine stops on the route, and you can hop on and off at any place.  For first-time visitors to our new home, we take the ride all the way to the top, and walk the 4 miles back, a leisurely stroll which is very near the top of my favorite things.  Ray being Ray, I often stop and take a dip at water-fall-featuring spots or, really, any particularly scenic swimming hole, which tries the patience of my dear wife.  Fortunately for me, since she has taken up painting, she whiles away the time by making sketches of the flowers and scenery.

 

The open-air shuttle is used mainly by tourists, tho.  All the day long, the citizens of Tucson and surrounding areas walk up the road into the canyon, by the hundreds and hundreds every day.  All types of folks: Anglos, Hispanics, Asians, all types of Americans and foreign visitors, lone males and females, groups of friends young and old, and families galore.  You won't believe how many babies are pushed into the canyon in strollers by their moms and dads every day. The strollers are left on the road a mile or two in, as the families take short side trails to the always-nearby creek and set up umbrellas and picnics.  In sum, Sabino Canyon is heavily used by a complete cross-section of the citizens of the Tucson area, with nary a spot of litter ever visible. Tellingly, restrooms and trash bins are available periodically all the way into the canyon.  And because the canyon's entrance is a dozen miles from downtown Tucson, perhaps, the chaotic tents and social turmoil that, alas, is so often associated with the lamentably poorly-met challenges of homelessness are, so far, absent from Sabino Canyon. 

 

The availability of water in which to enjoy the creek and canyon differs between the two spots also.  There is almost always water in Big Chico Creek in Chico Canyon.  Sometimes there is too much water, and turbulent spring flows amongst the large rocks of Iron Canyon (Bear Hole (aka Bare Hole!) and Salmon Hole) claim the life of a young, over-eager but under-cautious swimmer every couple of years.  But typically it is only as Chico Creek enters the Sacramento Valley and flows through the city of Chico that the creek frequently de-waters in the summer.  But the rest of the year, it flows clear into the Sacramento River, and thence out San Francisco Bay into the Pacific.

 

Sabino Creek marches to the beat of a different drummer.  It sits within the Sonoran Desert, remember, an area that typically gets only 12 inches or so of rain a year—less than half what the foothills of northern California typically get.  This rainfall is split between gentle winter rains of December thru February, and the intense late summer afternoon "monsoon" rains of mid-June to mid-September.  So the creek tends to be flush during the winter and early spring (I have swum it in mid-March), but drops rapidly in the dry late spring and early summer, to stagnant pools here and there.  The "monsoon" rains come, tho, and the creek fills rapidly, permitting swimming throughout the late summer and early fall.  Then it dries up again in the fall, until the winter rains come.  So:  you have to know your creek, and be aware of the rainfall, particularly of flash floods after heavy monsoon rain days, which can be deadly.  I'm still learning, but even only being here from February to now (mid-September), I've had plenty of wonderful times.

 

And I confidently look forward to many more wonderful times swimming the deep pools, rock-hopping up the rough, turbulent stretches, and floating down the placid stretches of Sabino Creek in the future.  Depending on how many years I've been given, I hope to accumulate a store of heart-filling experiences in Sabino Creek winding its way down Sabino Canyon.  Who knows?  Maybe some day my wife and kids will tenderly place my ashes in this creek, and watch them swirl and spread amongst the dragonflies and past the foraging Coati Mundis as the Saguaros bear witness from the slopes.  I look forward to that happening—at the proper time.  Barnett out. 

 

 

(Warning:  this is a story of how two otherwise sensible people turned their lives upside-down.  Then having done that, they proceeded to turn their upside-down lives on its head—again—and ended up somewhere even more unexpected.  Fasten your seat belts.)

 

Part One.  It seemed such a simple, innocuous notion as the summer of 2021 dragged on.  Tired of Northern California's past three years of summer/fall wildfires and bad air? Of the realization that the fire that destroyed Paradise in 2018—19 miles from our Chico home—was not a one-time aberration but merely the first of a predictable new summer reality?  Tired of air purifiers chugging away inside your home and donning masks most of the summer whenever you go outside?  Leave it!  Drive east from California until you find fresh air, and then camp in that glorious, deep-breathing freshness for six weeks of July and August! 

 

We invested a thousand dollars in camping equipment, jammed it into our all-electric Chevy Bolt, and headed east over the Sierra Nevadas for Reno, where we struggled to lucidly explain our solution to summer California wildfires to Tammy's Dad.  No matter.  The next day we resumed our eastward escape.  Halfway through Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the Air Quality Index (AQI) had begun to drop toward safe, healthy levels.  By the end of the day, as we entered Utah, we could roll the windows down and take big, deep gulps of healthy air.  "Fresh air!" became our byword as we ploughed further east out of Utah to the Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. 

 

Our Wawona 6-person tent (with added vestibule providing cover for cooking or just lounging out of rain or too much sun) was our Colorado home for the next two weeks.  Fresh air every morning—and all the rest of the day!  The camp grounds were huge, sites large, and a free (hot!) shower was a pleasant five-minute walk away.  Pinyon pines and Gambel oaks surrounded us, and the ancient cliff-houses of Pre-Pueblo peoples awed and inspired.  "Monsoon" thunder storms also awed us, with incredibly dense rainfall several afternoons a week. But the new tent held up fine, and the storms cooled everything off.  We experimented and finally perfected healthy, simple meals on our two-burner Coleman stove.  Lots of walks to the surrounding mesas and mountain flanks.  And infinite quantities of—yes, fresh air. 

 

But Santa Fe and Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch beckoned.  Ray had explored both with his travel-buddy Al on several trips, and had promised Tammy she'd soon see them.  So we reluctantly left Mesa Verde and made the short-day drive to a campground/RV park outside of Santa Fe, pitched the Taj Mahal of tents there amidst more Pinyon pines and now Western junipers, and soaked in the fresh air of northern New Mexico.  But here, in addition to golden sunsets dazzling us from our lawn chairs outside the tent, we had culture aplenty to enjoy.  The old Plaza in Santa Fe's historic center; the nearby St. Francis Cathedral with roots stretching to 1598; the anthropology museums on Museum Hill south of town; and most important the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum just west of the Plaza.  It was all wonderful.  Short drives took us to the Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings in Bandelier National Monument; the old village of Chimayo in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, with its cathedral dispensing healing soil; a bit further to the old village of Abiquiu, where O'Keeffe lived in the winters; and to Ghost Ranch, where the indomitable artist invented a new, iconic genre of American landscape painting—the surrounding skulls, flowers, mountains, and mesas. 

 

It was in the evenings, watching the sun set in glory and the stars emerge from the darkening sky above our Santa Fe campground, that it happened.  Completely unforeseen, we began to wonder: could we have more of all this than just six weeks a year?  Why not escape the drought and heat and wildfires of California—altogether?  We laughed, skeptically, as we both admitted to these weird notions.  Ridiculous.  True, our kids and my daughter from my first marriage had all left Chico.  True, Chico was still crowded with refugees (and traffic) from the 2018 Camp Fire that had destroyed Paradise.  True, Tammy had just retired from three decades of teaching, only weeks before our Fresh Air Tour began.  And the future in Northern California promised nothing but continued—expanding—occurrences of wildfires, drought, congestion, and dropping levels of water in our beloved Chico Creek two blocks from our home. 

 

But—ridiculous.  Tho Tammy was still in her 50s, Ray was in his mid-70's, and had solemnly vowed that our last move 12 years ago would be his last.  People in their 70's don't pick up and move to a new state, leaving friends and locales cultivated since 1976 (for Ray) and 1984 (for Tammy).  They just don't.  But the notion wouldn't die.  We were genuinely sad as we packed up the tent outside of Santa Fe.  We journeyed a day's drive north to Boulder, Colorado, where our daughter Ashlyn was in the grad program at U. of Colorado.  As we left the arid southwest of New Mexico, we heard of fires in the great forests of central and north Colorado.  We had a hint of elevated AQI.  We had a marvelous time with Ash and her partner Steven, but were glad when range anxiety about traveling over the high Rockies in our electric vehicle (and spotty distribution of recharging stations) persuaded us to return to our Southwest route to get back to California; we had become rather fond of Utah and New Mexico.  We stopped at southern Colorado's Pagosa Springs, and swam in the San Juan river bisecting the town.  We climbed up to the massive red-tinted sandstone Wilson Arch south of Moab in Utah, and stayed in Green River just beyond. The incredible Black Dragon Canyon (rocks over 250 million years old) west of Green River bowled us over. All these portions of the Southwest, so closely clustered together in easy drives, provided not just fresh air, but beauty and a distinctive landscape; yes, we had indeed become very fond of the region. 

 

The upshot:  during our return drive to Chico after 6 weeks of camping and enjoying the American Southwest, the notion of relocating, of beginning a new chapter in our lives, had shifted from something ridiculous and laughable, to something worth exploring seriously.  Both of us were retired, with a living income appearing in our bank account the first of every month—why not?  It was a push/pull sort of thing.  California drought, wildfires, congestion and social unrest pushing, and the Southwest's awesome (and novel) landscape, history, and culture pulling.  Returned to Chico, we had two weeks before leaving for our annual month in Hawaii.  We took a deep breath, thought it through again, then contacted a real estate agent: let's just gingerly dip into the market while we're gone.  Nothing serious, of course.  No prepping our home, no big repairs or painting.  Just informally, tentatively, see what might happen. 

 

We had our usual marvelous time on Maui.  Snorkeling, walking the beaches, swimming, lying in the sand learning the constellations gleaming brightly above us at night.  The Southwest grew a bit dimmer over the month.  Moving to Hawaii also seemed attractive, but the finances really, really didn't make that feasible.  Moving to New Mexico?  Only slightly less outlandish. 

 

The day we arrived back home from Hawaii, we received an offer for our home that would be hard to reject.  We accepted it.  Called the kids and told them we were moving to Santa Fe.  The word quickly spread around our CoHousing community.  Universally, the reaction was either a stiffly polite "Really? That's interesting" (the kids) or a stunned, stammering "Ahhh…" (the friends, who later admitted that it translated to "You guys must be out of your minds!").  We persisted.  Having received bids from moving companies to pack and move us for $14,000, we decided to do it ourselves.  The kids agreed to gather in Chico over Christmas to help us pack what we'd take with us to our new home (close of escrow was January 4).  They duly gathered: daughter Ashlyn and Steven from Boulder, son Lou and daughter Heather with our two grandkids from the Bay Area.  The evening of the first day, one of the gang tested positive for Covid.  All scattered, as per common sense and Covid protocols, leaving only Lou with us. The young fellow knew he was coming down with the disease (which he did), but was determined to pack up those books of Dad's vaunted library which were coming with us to Santa Fe (which he also did). 

 

Tammy did an incredible job of selling a very large portion of our belongings (our lives?) on Facebook Marketplace.  We piggy-backed on the yard sale of a neighbor.  It was still a huge, formidable job to pack up what we had determined to bring with us to Santa Fe into boxes—plates, bowls, utensils, clothes, photo albums, wall-material (photos, paintings), furniture. Und so weiter.  We threw away tons of things into the dumpsters behind schools, at least until we very nearly got arrested for doing so.  Finally the home was empty, and our belongings (our lives?) sitting in a Chico storage locker.

 

Exhausted, and not at all sure that we were not, in fact, "out of our minds", in early January we put our beloved (and by this time thoroughly spooked) cat Inky into her travel cage in the backseat of our rented car (no way the little Bolt was remotely large enough) and drove in three stages to Santa Fe, where we wearily unpacked our bags into the lovely home of Brenda and Kent, former Chico CoHousing friends who had moved to Santa Fe a few years previous and were about to visit grandkids in southern California.  We began to acquaint ourselves with the real estate market in our new home town.

 

Part Two.  To make a long and agonizing story short, Tam and I within ten days in Santa Fe realized two things.  Several snowstorms and many frigid mornings brought home the fact that Santa Fe winters were quite unlike balmy Santa Fe summers. We had moved into a distinctly colder winter climate.  Beyond that, houses in our price range were few, and you had to add 10% onto the asking price and be prepared to hand over cash promptly to even be included in the frenzied bidding for a home.  In other words: winter temperatures too low, home prices too high. 

 

Gulp.  Yes, we ideally should have figured this out before.  But remember:  we were in the very middle of what the Prussian von Clausewitz had described as "the fog of war."  In any enterprise of importance, you make your plans as best you can, and then when the enterprise begins and you are quickly enveloped in uncertainty and unanticipated catastrophes, you just remain nimble and imaginative and make your way boldly through the fog.  I reminded Tam and myself of General George Patton many times in the ensuing days: driving his Third Army tank corps brilliantly through the debris of war toward Berlin in December of 1944, he defied all known laws of military tactical logistics and abruptly wheeled his forces 90 degrees north to rescue 101st Airborne paratroopers facing annihilation by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.  He succeeded.  Then got his tanks to Berlin.  We would do the same.  We would visit and camp outside Santa Fe every summer—but we wouldn't reside there.  We would, instead, live in—in—uh…   Where the devil were we going to live? 

 

Our new home would be somewhere in the Southwest, clearly. We researched and pondered possibilities in New Mexico other than Santa Fe.  Up north in the countryside around Abiquiu, our much-loved Georgia O'Keeffe country? Down south in Las Cruces, a lovely university-town near the Mexican border?  In the Jemez mountains to the west of Santa Fe, close to Bandelier?  Or—how about checking out that "active retirement community" our friends Harold and Janet had moved to a year ago, and described with enthusiasm in their Christmas letter?  Where was that?  Oh yes: Arizona.  Hmmm. Just north of Tucson, a small burg called Oro Valley. Where the heck is Tucson?  Oh, here it is, way south in Arizona, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, yet.  We investigated all the possibilities, both New Mexico and southern Arizona:  the winters, the water supply, the recreational opportunities, the housing market.  Southern Arizona proved especially intriguing. Tucson had been stockpiling water from the Colorado River for decades, and was flush with the stuff.  (Oro Valley hadn't, tho.)  Of course, where our friends lived, one of the Del Webb "Sun City" developments, was by definition full of old people (or at least 55 years of age, which wasn't really old).  Best of all, we discovered that Tucson and Oro Valley really did have very mild winters.  You could hardly call them "winters," in fact. 

 

So into the rental car goes Inky, again, 1,200 miles under her feline belt and another 500 to go to Tucson.  Two things are clear to us:  we are going to seriously investigate living in water-rich Tucson, and we aren't going to live amongst a bunch of retirees in water-dicey Sun City.  Arriving in southern Arizona, to be polite we have lunch with our friends in the Sun City community restaurant.  Food is delicious; a bright red Vermillion flycatcher flits about in the nearby trees; a tour of the shared community facilities reveals several swimming pools; ceramic studios with virtually free clay and kiln use; a watercolor studio whose artists painting that afternoon welcomed Tammy with open arms; a well-stocked woodworking shop the size of a shopping center; a stained-glass studio; a pool room with excellent tables; tennis courts galore.  But most surprising:  active, attractive, lively residents happy to show you around these facilities, not just making things but learning the ukulele or swimming or bicycling or walking around the community.  All yours to enjoy for a monthly home-owners fee of—prepare yourself—$178. 

 

Tammy and I return to our car after our tour.  We sit silent in the front seat, both staring straight ahead. She finally speaks.  "Well, what did you think, Ray?"  I reply, in a tentative, hoarse voice.  "I want to live here, Tam."  She turns to me quickly, her face alight.  "Me too! I never want to leave!"  So we canceled our upcoming meeting with a Tucson realtor, found a Sun City realtor and soon a home in our price range (no 10% addition required) that we really liked (and so did our kids, when they viewed its Zillow entry). We made an offer the day we toured it, and by that evening were the proud owners of a new home in sunny southern Arizona.  Three weeks later, Ray and his friend Bruce drove a rental truck stuffed with our belongings 20 straight hours from Chico to our new home, where Bruce's wife Jody was keeping Tam company.  After Bruce and Jody's departure, we stared at the ocean of boxes crammed into our new home for another two weeks, until Ashlyn arrived from Boulder, and promptly unpacked all the books Lou had packed back in Chico, which got us started. 

 

As of this writing, we have lived here six months, and love it more every day.  All the kids and grandkids have visited us, and approve of the new home.  We play pool, we swim, we explore the surrounding parks and trails.  We belong to the Tucson Botanical Gardens, and visit regularly. Our neighbors in Sun City, Oro Valley are wonderful, and uniformly friendly and interesting folks.  Tammy and I walk together around our new community every evening, she taking dozens of photos of the stunning sunsets.  Tam is a regular at our immediate neighborhood's Happy Hour on Friday afternoons.  In the mornings, Tam takes long exploratory walks in the community, while Ray traverses two blocks to an entrance into the surrounding Sonoran Desert, and completes "Ray and Tam's double-loop desert walk."  As a biologist, Ray is completely fascinated by the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert, far and away the most diverse and interesting of the four North American deserts.  Tammy has taken up painting again, and is exploring the discipline with characteristic verve and imagination (check her Instagram page).  Ray is a desert rat, and also spends a day a week exploring Sabino Creek in Sabino Canyon (google it!), where he swims and spots wildlife to his heart's content. 

 

So that's the story of how Tammy and Ray took a fresh air tour, which turned into a journey, as we had the eyes to see one chapter of our life together closing, and another opening. At times the journey was frightfully difficult, both physically and emotionally. We stubbornly moved forward, and amidst some stumbles kept searching until we found a place that felt right to us. Somehow we landed on our feet. We understand that this sort of journey is not for everyone.  But it worked for us, our marriage stronger by virtue of our shared struggles and decisions.  We are happy here in southern Arizona.  And yes, it is definitely a new chapter.  Come visit.  Barnett out. 

 

 

 

Guest blog by Edinburgh, UK editor and publisher Jacquetta Megarry; see note at end

 

Michael Brune's 22 July 2020 manifesto accusing John Muir of racism embodies four dangerous fallacies. They are not unique to the Sierra Club. Indeed, in the wake of the George Floyd's brutal death in Minneapolis in May 2020, worldwide reactions have included statue-toppling, cancelling of distinguished names and reputations, and attempts to rewrite history. The proposal to take John Muir's name off an elementary school named in his honour in San Francisco and elsewhere should be seen in this context of over-reaction to a tragic event that took place over a century after Muir's death in 1914. The proposal rests on four fallacies, which must be avoided:

 

1. Don't rely on a few words quoted out of context: evaluate the man's whole life.
Brune's attack relies on a few negative phrases quoted from the young Muir's unedited and unpublished journals. He ignores Muir's many other positive comments and, throughout his long life, his campaigns and travels. Later he travelled and spent time living with Native Americans, and commended their stewardship of the environment.

 

2. Never find somebody guilty by association.
Brune criticises John Muir for his friendship with "people like Henry Fairfield Osborn, who worked for both the conservation of nature and the conservation of the white race". Muir respected Osborn's work as a zoologist and paleontologist. Osborn's role in founding the American Eugenics Society, though, was years after Muir's death. Muir had a very wide circle of friends and colleagues; nobody is responsible for opinions other than their own.

 

3. Don't attribute prejudice to a person for words that became pejorative long after his death.

Fashions in language evolve over time. Words such as "negro" were at first purely descriptive, only later acquiring racist overtones. According to the Jim Crow Museum, until "black power" was coined in 1966, "negro" was how most back Americans described themselves. From the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson promoted the term African-American. Nowadays in some countries it's common to refer to people as black, in others as BME or BAME (black, asian and minority ethnic), BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour), and in others simply as people of colour. Before too long, any or all of these may become unacceptable as new words are adopted as "correct".

 

4. Beware of anachronistic judgement and woke rewriting of history.
Muir lived at a time when unthinking racism was the norm, and yet he challenged it by his words, deeds and campaigns. His radical thinking and pioneering conservation should be celebrated, not grotesquely rewritten by people who have barely studied him.

 

--Jacquetta Megarry is the founder of Rucksack Readers, a successful publisher of trail-handy guides to hiking paths in Ireland, England, and Scotland--including The John Muir Trail there.